Unify your EmberCLI and Rails Workflows!
EmberCLI-Rails is designed to give you the best of both worlds:
- Stay up to date with the latest JavaScript technology and EmberCLI addons
- Develop your Rails API and Ember front-ends from within a single process
- Inject Rails-generated content into your EmberCLI application
- Avoid Cross-Origin Resource Sharing gotchas by serving your EmberCLI applications and your API from a single domain
- Write truly end-to-end integration tests, exercising your application's entire stack through JavaScript-enabled Capybara tests
- Deploy your entire suite of applications to Heroku with a single
git push
If you're having trouble, checkout the example project!
EmberCLI-Rails Supports EmberCLI 1.13.13 and later.
Add the following to your Gemfile
:
gem "ember-cli-rails"
Then run bundle install
:
$ bundle install
If you haven't created an Ember application yet, generate a new one:
$ ember new frontend --skip-git
First, generate the gem's initializer:
$ rails generate ember:init
This will create the following initializer:
# config/initializers/ember.rb
EmberCli.configure do |c|
c.app :frontend
end
This initializer assumes that your Ember application exists in
Rails.root.join("frontend")
.
If this is not the case, you could
- move your existing Ember application into
Rails.root.join("frontend")
- configure
frontend
to reference the Ember application in its current directory:
c.app :frontend, path: "~/projects/my-ember-app"
Initializer options
-
name
- this represents the name of the Ember CLI application. -
path
- the path where your Ember CLI application is located. The default value is the name of your app in the Rails root. -
silent
- this provides--silent
option for Ember CLI commands to control verbosity of their output.
EmberCli.configure do |c|
c.app :adminpanel # path defaults to `Rails.root.join("adminpanel")`
c.app :frontend,
path: "/path/to/your/ember-cli-app/on/disk"
c.app :payments, silent: true # by default it's false
end
Next, install the ember-cli-rails-addon:
$ cd path/to/frontend
$ ember install ember-cli-rails-addon
Be sure that the addon's MAJOR
and MINOR
version matches the gem's
MAJOR
and MINOR
versions.
For instance, if you're using the 0.6.x
version of the gem, specify
~> 0.6.0
in your Ember app's package.json
:
{
"devDependencies": {
"ember-cli-rails-addon": "~> 0.6.0"
}
}
Configure Rails to route requests to the frontend
Ember application:
# config/routes.rb
Rails.application.routes.draw do
mount_ember_app :frontend, to: "/"
end
Routing options
to
- The path to handle as an Ember application. This will only apply toformat: :html
requests. Additionally, this will handle child routes as well. For instance, mountingmount_ember_app :frontend, to: "/frontend"
will handle aformat: :html
request to/frontend/posts
.controller
- Defaults to"ember_cli/ember"
action
- Defaults to"index"
Finally, install your Ember application's dependencies:
$ rake ember:install
Boot your Rails application, navigate to "/"
, and view your EmberCLI
application!
EmberCLI Rails exposes several useful rake tasks.
ember:install
Install the Ember applications' dependencies.
ember:compile
Compile the Ember applications.
ember:test
Execute Ember's test suite.
If you're using Rake to run the test suite, make sure to configure your test
task to depend on ember:test
.
For example, to configure a bare rake
command to run both RSpec and Ember test
suites, configure the default
task to depend on both spec
and ember:test
.
task default: [:spec, "ember:test"]
In production environments, assets should be served over a Content Delivery Network.
Configuring an ember-cli-rails
application to serve Ember's assets over a CDN
is very similar to configuring an EmberCLI application to serve assets over a
CDN:
var app = new EmberApp({
fingerprint: {
prepend: 'https://cdn.example.com/'
}
});
If you're serving the Ember application from a path other than "/"
, the
prepend
URL must end with the mounted path:
var app = new EmberApp({
fingerprint: {
// for an Ember application mounted to `/admin_panel/`
prepend: 'https://cdn.example.com/admin_panel/',
}
});
As long as your CDN is configured to pull from your Rails application , your assets will be served over the CDN.
By default, EmberCLI-Rails uses a file-based deployment strategy that depends on
the output of ember build
.
Using this deployment strategy, Rails will serve the index.html
file and other
assets that ember build
produces.
These EmberCLI-generated assets are served with the same Cache-Control
headers
as Rails' other static files:
# config/environments/production.rb
Rails.application.configure do
# serve static files with cache headers set to expire in 1 year
config.static_cache_control = "public, max-age=31622400"
end
If you need to override this behavior (for instance, if you're using
ember-cli-deploy
's "Lightning Fast Deployment" strategy in
production
), you can specify the strategy's class in the initializer:
EmberCli.configure do |config|
config.app :frontend, deploy: { production: EmberCli::Deploy::Redis }
end
This example configures the frontend
Ember application to retrieve the
index's HTML from an ember-cli-deploy-redis
-populated Redis entry using the
ember-cli-rails-deploy-redis
gem.
If you're deploying HTML with a custom strategy in development
or test
,
disable EmberCLI-Rails' build step by setting ENV["SKIP_EMBER"] = true
.
NOTE:
Specifying a deployment strategy is only supported for applications that use the
mount_ember_app
and render_ember_app
helpers.
To configure your EmberCLI-Rails applications for Heroku:
- Execute
rails generate ember:heroku
. - Commit the newly generated files.
- Add the NodeJS buildpack and configure NPM to include the
bower
dependency's executable file.
$ heroku buildpacks:clear
$ heroku buildpacks:add --index 1 heroku/nodejs
$ heroku buildpacks:add --index 2 heroku/ruby
$ heroku config:set NPM_CONFIG_PRODUCTION=false
$ heroku config:unset SKIP_EMBER
You are ready to deploy:
$ git push heroku master
NOTE Run the generator each time you introduce additional EmberCLI applications into the project.
EmberCLI-Rails executes both npm install
and bower install
during EmberCLI's
compilation, triggered by the asset:precompilation
rake task.
The npm
and bower
executables are required to be defined in the deployment
SSH session's $PATH
. It is not sufficient to modify the session's $PATH
in
a .bash_profile
.
To resolve this issue, prepend the Node installation's bin
directory to the
target system's $PATH
:
#config/deploy/production.rb
set :default_env, {
"PATH" => "/home/deploy/.nvm/versions/node/v4.2.1/bin:$PATH"
}
The system in this example is using nvm
to configure the node version. If
you're not using nvm
, make sure the string you prepend to the $PATH
variable
contains the directory or directories that contain the bower
and npm
executables.
By default, routes defined by ember_app
will be rendered with the internal
EmberCli::EmberController
.
The EmberCli::EmberController
renders the Ember application's index.html
and
injects the Rails-generated CSRF tags into the <head>
.
To customize the view, create app/views/ember_cli/ember/index.html.erb
:
<%= render_ember_app ember_app do |head| %>
<% head.append do %>
<%= csrf_meta_tags %>
<% end %>
<% end %>
The ember_app
helper is available within the EmberCli::EmberController
's
view, and refers to the name of the current EmberCLI application.
To inject the EmberCLI generated index.html
, use the render_ember_app
helper in your view:
<!-- app/views/application/index.html.erb -->
<%= render_ember_app :frontend do |head, body| %>
<% head.append do %>
<%= csrf_meta_tags %>
<% end %>
<% body.append do %>
<%= render partial: "my-analytics" %>
<% end %>
<% end %>
The body
block argument and the corresponding call to body.append
in the
example are both optional, and can be omitted.
For more information on how to work with EmberCLI-generated stylesheets, refer to the Stylesheets section. EmberCLI-generated CSS will be embedded in the response's HTML document by default.
To serve assets generated and served by Rails, inject them into the document's
<head>
:
<%= render_ember_app :frontend do |head| %>
<% head.append do %>
<%= stylesheet_link_tag "application" %>
<%= csrf_meta_tags %>
<% end %>
<% end %>
There are no technical limitations to sharing assets between the Ember client and the Rails server, but picking one or the other might simplify the project's organization.
Sharing code during asset compilation is not possible.
For example, Ember's SCSS files cannot use @import
directives referencing
Rails' SCSS modules.
To override this behavior, you can specify [any of Rails' routing options] route-options.
For the sake of this example, override the controller
and action
options:
# config/routes
Rails.application.routes.draw do
mount_ember_app :frontend, to: "/", controller: "application", action: "index"
end
When serving the EmberCLI generated index.html
with the render_ember_app
helper, make sure the controller's layout
is disabled, as EmberCLI generates a
fully-formed HTML document:
# app/controllers/application.rb
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
def index
render layout: false
end
end
Rendering EmberCLI applications with render_ember_app
is the recommended,
actively supported method of serving EmberCLI applications.
However, for the sake of backwards compatibility, ember-cli-rails
supports
injecting the EmberCLI-generated assets into an existing Rails layout.
Following the example above, configure the mounted EmberCLI application to be
served by a custom controller (ApplicationController
, in this case).
In the corresponding view, use the asset helpers:
<%= include_ember_script_tags :frontend %>
<%= include_ember_stylesheet_tags :frontend %>
Rendering Ember applications to paths other than /
requires additional
configuration.
Consider a scenario where you had Ember applications named frontend
and
admin_panel
, served from /
and /admin_panel
respectively.
First, specify the Ember applications in the initializer:
EmberCli.configure do |c|
c.app :frontend
c.app :admin_panel, path: "path/to/admin_ember_app"
end
Next, mount the applications alongside the rest of Rails' routes:
# /config/routes.rb
Rails.application.routes.draw do
mount_ember_app :frontend, to: "/"
mount_ember_app :admin_panel, to: "/admin_panel"
end
Then set each Ember application's baseURL
to the mount point:
// frontend/config/environment.js
module.exports = function(environment) {
var ENV = {
modulePrefix: 'frontend',
environment: environment,
baseURL: '/',
// ...
}
};
// path/to/admin_ember_app/config/environment.js
module.exports = function(environment) {
var ENV = {
modulePrefix: 'admin_panel',
environment: environment,
baseURL: '/admin_panel', // originally '/'
// ...
}
};
Finally, configure EmberCLI's fingerprinting to prepend the mount point to the application's assets:
// frontend/ember-cli-build.js
module.exports = function(defaults) {
var app = new EmberApp(defaults, {
fingerprint: {
// matches the `/` mount point
prepend: 'https://cdn.example.com/',
}
});
};
// path/to/admin_ember_app/ember-cli-build.js
module.exports = function(defaults) {
var app = new EmberApp(defaults, {
fingerprint: {
// matches the `/admin_panel` mount point
prepend: 'https://cdn.example.com/admin_panel/',
}
});
};
When injecting the EmberCLI-generated assets with the include_ember_script_tags
and include_ember_stylesheet_tags
helpers to a path other than "/"
, a
<base>
tag must also be injected with a corresponding href
value:
<base href="/">
<%= include_ember_script_tags :frontend %>
<%= include_ember_stylesheet_tags :frontend %>
<base href="/admin_panel/">
<%= include_ember_script_tags :admin_panel %>
<%= include_ember_stylesheet_tags :admin_panel %>
If you're using the include_ember
style helpers with a single-page Ember
application that defers routing to the Rails application, insert a call to
mount_ember_assets
at the bottom of your routes file to serve the
EmberCLI-generated assets:
# config/routes.rb
Rails.application.routes.draw do
mount_ember_assets :frontend, to: "/"
end
Your Rails controllers, by default, expect a valid authenticity token to
be submitted along with non-GET
requests.
Without the authenticity token, requests will respond with
422 Unprocessable Entity
errors (specifically
ActionController::InvalidAuthenticityToken
).
To add the necessary tokens to requests, inject the csrf_meta_tags
into
the template:
<!-- app/views/application/index.html.erb -->
<%= render_ember_app :frontend do |head| %>
<% head.append do %>
<%= csrf_meta_tags %>
<% end %>
<% end %>
The default EmberCli::EmberController
and the default view handle behave like
this by default.
If an Ember application is mounted with another controller, it should append
the CSRF tags to its view's <head>
.
ember-cli-rails-addon configures your Ember application to make HTTP
requests with the injected CSRF tokens in the X-CSRF-TOKEN
header.
If you're using a multi-process server (Puma, Unicorn, etc.) in development, make sure it's configured to run a single worker process.
Without restricting the server to a single process, it is possible for multiple EmberCLI runners to clobber each others' work.
If set on the environment, SKIP_EMBER
will configure ember-cli-rails
to skip
the build step entirely. This is useful if you're using an alternative
deployment strategy in the test
or development
environment. By default,
ember-cli-rails
will skip the build step in production
-like environments.
If set on the environment, the value of EMBER_ENV
will be passed to the
ember
process as the value of the --environment
flag.
If EMBER_ENV
is unspecified, the current Rails environment will be passed to
the ember
process, with the exception of non-standard Rails environments,
which will be replaced with production
.
While being managed by EmberCLI Rails, EmberCLI process will have
access to the RAILS_ENV
environment variable. This can be helpful to detect
the Rails environment from within the EmberCLI process.
This can be useful to determine whether or not EmberCLI is running in its own standalone process or being managed by Rails.
For example, to enable ember-cli-mirage API responses in
development
while being run outside of Rails (while run by ember serve
),
check for the absence of the RAILS_ENV
environment variable:
// config/environment.js
if (environment === 'development') {
ENV['ember-cli-mirage'] = {
enabled: typeof process.env.RAILS_ENV === 'undefined',
}
}
RAILS_ENV
will be absent in production builds.
This project supports:
- EmberCLI versions
>= 1.13.13
This project supports:
- Ruby versions
>= 2.1.0
- Rails versions
>=4.1.x
.
To learn more about supported versions and upgrades, read the upgrading guide.
See the CONTRIBUTING document. Thank you, contributors!
Open source templates are Copyright (c) 2015 thoughtbot, inc. It contains free software that may be redistributed under the terms specified in the LICENSE file.
ember-cli-rails was originally created by Pavel Pravosud and Jonathan Jackson.
ember-cli-rails is maintained by Sean Doyle and Jonathan Jackson.
ember-cli-rails is maintained and funded by thoughtbot, inc. The names and logos for thoughtbot are trademarks of thoughtbot, inc.
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