AkitaOnRails.com tecnologia e carreira

Posted on September 09, 2009

There are several ways to start a new Rails project nowadays, specially since Rails brought project templates to the mix. On the other hand there are still lot’s of generators. So, today I want to just pinpoint some tips on this regard.

First of all, make sure you have all the usual suspects installed:

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sudo gem install rspec rspec-rails josevalim-inherited_resources mislav-will_paginate justinfrench-formtastic thoughtbot-factory_girl haml ryanb-nifty_generators

One other is dry_scaffold from grimen. I’ve made a fork and added rspec support today. I think the 0.3.3 version should be generated soon from Github, then you will be able to install it like this:

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sudo gem install akitaonrails-dry_scaffold

But you can also install it manually from the source:

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git clone git://github.com/akitaonrails/dry_scaffold.git
cd dry_scaffold
gem build dry_scaffold.gemspec
sudo gem install dry_scaffold-0.3.3.gem

Now, create a normal Rails 2.3.x project and configure your config/environment.rb with:

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config.gem 'haml'
config.gem 'will_paginate'
config.gem 'justinfrench-formtastic', :lib => 'formtastic', 
  :source => 'http://gems.github.com'
config.gem 'josevalim-inherited_resources', :lib => 'inherited_resources', 
  :source => 'http://gems.github.com'

And also add the following to your config/environments/test.rb:

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config.gem 'rspec'
config.gem 'rspec-rails'

In order to add Rspec support, create the initial Formtastic stylesheets and add a little bit of sugar to your layouts do the following:

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./script/generate rspec
./script/gererate formtastic_stylesheets
./script/generate nifty_layout --haml

Notice that I am referring to Ryan Bates’ Nifty Generators. I really like it’s initial CSS and layout to start a new project instead of the default ‘blank’ theme. But that’s just me :-)

The excellent Formtastic will create your scaffolded views with a bit more of web semantics, so it’s highly recommended to use. To make it look pretty, add the following to your ‘app/views/layouts/application.html.haml’:

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  = stylesheet_link_tag 'application'
  = stylesheet_link_tag 'formtastic'
  = stylesheet_link_tag 'formtastic_changes'

Finally, you can start scaffolding some resources to get started, for example:

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./script/generate dry_scaffold Post title:string body:text --rspec

If you don’t like fixtures you’d rather use Factory Girl instead doing this:

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./script/generate dry_scaffold Post title:string body:text --rspec --fgirl

By default, it’s going to create thin controller with Inherited Resources and paginated with Will Paginate. The view templates will use HAML and Formtastic for a semantically rich form. It will create tests using the standard test/unit and fixtures, but I’d rather choose Rspec and Factory Girl.

It’s also going to generate a separated “_form” partial that both “new” and “edit” views will use, which is one of those things that you do all the time after a normal scaffold. The usage of HAML is not very common, but I would recommend everybody to at least try it for a while, it will grow on you quickly. And having well formatted HTML outputs is always nice.

The Dry Scaffold also supports generating just models (“./script/generate dry_model”). Read the documentation on the github project site to understand all the options.

With this, you should be good to go and start to rapidly prototype your next web application.