People have complained that it takes far longer to create a basic app in
Rails than in Drupal, PHP, and other technologies. I’ve decided to do
something about it by streamlining the process of starting a basic app.
Check out my new Ruby gem copy_rails_tutorial. It copies Michael
Hartl’s
Rails Tutorial Sample App for use in your projects and provides a great
productivity advantage over starting a new app completely from scratch.
The inputs are a base name (to replace “sample_app_rails_4”) and app
name
(to replace “SampleApp”). CopyRailsTutorial has several commands that
you
can execute from the normal Unix/Linux shell - copy_rails_tutorial_all,
copy_rails_tutorial_static, and copy_rails_tutorial_users. RSpec,
Cucumber, Guard, Spork, and Twitter Bootstrap formatting are all
included
out of the box.
The “all” mode copies everything from the Rails Tutorial sample app -
static pages, users, microposts, and relationships. After you run the
setup.sh script added by this gem, all tests will pass. (Please note
that
for all other modes, you must follow the instructions in the
notes/to_do.txt file to get all tests to pass.)
The “static mode” includes the static pages but not the users, micro
posts,
or relationships. The “users” mode includes static pages and user
functionality but not micro posts or relationships.
Now you no longer need to plow through chapters 3 through 9 in Rails
tutorial to start an app with static pages and users. If you use a
Vagrant
Box with pre-installed Ruby on Rails (with Linux, OS X, or Windows as a
host OS), you can start off with a computer lacking Ruby on Rails and
have
a basic Rails app up and running in minutes instead of hours. This will
be
handy for Startup Weekend, 24-hour web site challenges, and other
situations that don’t tolerate a leisurely pace.