rails-app-template

Attempting Automation of Rails App Generation with .railsrc and App Generator

After too many years doing this, never mind how many, I'm attempting to automate the generation of Rails apps using a .railsrc file and an app-generation template. The .railsrc file, largely cribbed from numerous others, appears to work splendidly, albeit with a couple of wrinkles.

The template file, which should automate setup of the newly-created app to current shop standards, was developed incrementally; increments largely separated by the next wall I hit. The template-and-.railsrc setup presently generates a shop-standard-compliant app, creates a Git repo within the app folder, and creates a single commit for the generated app.

Possibly Relevant Background Items

Ruby is installed by way of rbenv, which we have used for years without known issues. We are presently on Ruby 3.0.2p107.
I'm attempting to continue our long-time shop-standard usage of rbenv-gemsets, which has hitherto (before attempted use of an app generator) saved our proverbial bacon often enough that I still have some hair. It supports our experimentation and evolution of candidate Gems for use, without polluting the system Gem repository.

FIXMEs

I still haven't figured out why the bundled Gems are being installed in the rbenv Gem repository rather than my gemset, as occurs when I perform the generator-script steps manually. As noted above, this adds the Gens to the Ruby-wide Gem store, possibly breaking other projects. These should be stored in the Gemset created earlier in the script (see the docs for usage details).

When running the app generator, the last command run (by the base generator) is bundle binstubs bundler. It produces the following output:

Skipped bundle since it already exists.
If you want to overwrite skipped stubs, use --force.

Removing bin/bundler immediately after our script runs bundle binstubs --all --force removes the reported error, and no additional steps are run by the base generator, so that appears to be the quick-and-dirty fix going forward. 🤮

If anyone has any better ideas, please open a PR or, at least, add a comment to the template script.

Standard README Items

Ruby and Rails Versions

This was developed using CRuby 3.0.2 for Rails 6.1.4.1. It is likely to work with earlier releases of Rails 6 (and possibly Rails 5), using Ruby versions appropriate for that version of Rails.

System Dependencies

This generator script assumes rbenv and its extension rbenv-gemset are installed. If you are in a use relationship with rvm or similarly eldritch Ruby version manager, you will need to make appropriate changes to template.rb on your own.

The new app, as specified in the .railsrc file, uses PostgreSQL for its database. Use of other Rails-supported databases (eg, MySQL) should be a drop-in replacement (in .railsrc), but has not been tested and is not supported.

Configuration

The options supplied to the rails new command are listed in the .railsrc file in this repository. Tinkering with those settings may be Useful but is not explicitly supported here.

Database creation and initialisation

The development and test databases for the generated app are created using the Rails-standard rails db:create db:migrate db:seed cycle, even though no seed data is initially used.

Database deletion

Removing the databases can be done in one of two ways:

Within the app top-level directory, run bin/rails db:drop; or
Outside the application directory (whether or not it exists at the time), running dropdb APP_development; dropdb APP_test (under PostgreSQL), where APP is the name of the app as supplied to rails new.

Test suite

The generated app uses RSpec as its test runner, with specs in the spec directory.

To run the test suite, run bin/rspec spec. This will run all specs (unless otherwise configured).

Running bin/rspec with no arguments will first run all tests (but see above paragraph), and then run the static-analysis tools flog, flay, reek, inch, and rubocop.

Further Instructions

You may well not wish to clone this repo, unless you're planning on filing an issue and/or PR. To copy the template.rb and .railsrc files independently, you can use curl:

curl --silent --ignore-content-lengt https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jdickey/rails-app-template/master/template.rb > template.rb
curl --silent --ignore-content-lengt https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jdickey/rails-app-template/master/.railsrc > $HOME/.railsrc

Note that this will overwrite any existing file; beware especially if you have an existing ~/.railsrc that you wish to preserve.

jdickey/rails-app-template