A thoughtfully designed template for building modern Rails apps 🔥

Get started on your new app within minutes instead of hours 🚗💨

• Getting started
• Optional configuration options
• Environment variables
• Contents
  • Base system
  • General
  • Frontend
  • Development
  • Test
  • Production
• Removed
• Notes
  • Account vs User
  • Webpacker, the asset pipeline, and ES6
  • Custom classes
  • Gemfile.dev / Gemfile.dev.lock
  • Rack::RejectTrace middleware
  • Favicons
• Docker
  • Usage examples:
• TODO
• License

To get going clone this repository and perform the following steps:

1. Run rails credentials:edit to re-generate config/master.key and create config/credentials.yml.enc.
2. If your application requires ActiveStorage, run rails active_storage:install to generate a migration that creates the necessary tables. Use rails db:migrate to run the migration.
3. You can now run bin/configure, which will help you in configuring the template.

As an alternative to running the script you can perform all of the following steps manually.

1. Change application name in config/application.rb.
2. Update database.yml to reflect the new application name.
3. Update TODO items in config/environments/production.rb.
4. If you plan on using Figaro, copy config/application.yml.example to config/application.yml.
5. ESLint is preconfigured for modern JS with React support (using Prettier). If you want to use it install packages with npm install / yarn [install], otherwise remove .eslintrc and package.json.
6. If you don't plan on tracking the template, you can remove the remote, otherwise rename it and add your new remote as appropriate.:

   $ git remote rename origin rails_new
   $ git remote add origin ...

• If you want to use AirBrake, make sure the following 2 environment variables are set:
  • AIRBRAKE_PROJECT_ID
  • AIRBRAKE_API_KEY
• New Relic is pre configured in config/newrelic.yml, but you need to comment in the environment variables for it work on Heroku (lines 10 and 17).
• The app is preconfigured for Google Analytics, just add GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_ID to the environment.
• We prefer to use vanilla Sidekiq for worker/queue management. If you prefer to use ActiveJob please see the configuration/options that were removed in 59cf38d.

All of the following have been installed and pre-configured:

• Rails 5.2.1
• Ruby 2.5.1
• PostgreSQL >= 9.2
• pg for ActiveRecord

• devise
• figaro
• foreman
• fast_jsonapi
• pundit
• sidekiq

All of these are managed by yarn.

• bootstrap4
• jquery
• jquery-ujs
• popper.js

• Brakeman
• bullet
• letter_opener
• memory_profiler
• newrelic_rpm
• nullalign
• pry
• pry-byebug
• pry-doc
• rack-mini-profiler
• RuboCop

Rspec has been preconfigured for Rails 5.1+ system tests.

• No need to require 'rails_helper, we do it in .rspec
• bundler-audit (runs on CircleCI)
• capybara
• factory_bot_rails
• shoulda-matchers
• spring-commands-rspec
• webmock

• airbrake
• heroku-deflater
• lograge
• rails_12factor
• rack-timeout: Configured via env variables, see documentation
• secureheaders

The following default Rails gems have been removed:

• coffee-rails
• jbuilder

Authentication concerns (your typical Devise configuration) are handled by the Account model. To connect this to one of several potential user roles the polymorphic authenticatable relationship is used.

By default ES6 will not work for files in app/assets/javascript since Uglifier will fail to process them. This is why we applied the following change to config/production.rb, which allows you to use ES6 project wide:

-  config.assets.js_compressor = :uglifier
+  config.assets.js_compressor = Uglifier.new(harmony: true)

Also note that for everything to work properly on Heroku, you need to set up your buildpacks like this:

heroku buildpacks:clear
heroku buildpacks:set heroku/nodejs
heroku buildpacks:add heroku/ruby

• ApplicationDecorator: lightweight alternative to Draper or similar gems.
• ApplicationForm: Minimal form class based on ActiveModel.
• ApplicationPresenter: a subclass of ApplicationDecorator for presenters, includes tag helpers.

All custom classes are fully documented with yard and come with generators.

Use yard doc to generate documentation and yard server --reload or yard server --gems to start a local documentation server.

If you want to add specific gems for development that may not be interesting for other developers, you can add a Gemfile.dev (ignored by our .gitignore). Gems listed there can be installed with bundle install --gemfile Gemfile.dev and the resulting lock file is gitignored too.

Example Gemfile.dev:

source 'https://rubygems.org'

eval_gemfile 'Gemfile'

gem 'awesome_print'

The eval_gemfile line will ensure that all gems from your regular Gemfile will be included too. The BUNDLE_GEMFILE variable can be used to let Bundler now which gemfile to use:

BUNDLE_GEMFILE=Gemfile.dev rails c

There's a custom middleware (Rack::RejectTrace) for completely disabling the HTTP TRACE method as required by certain security audits. It can be enabled via the BLOCK_HTTP_TRACE environment variable.

Favicons were generated with Real Favicon Generator, consider using the same tool when replacing them for your project.

For those wishing to use Docker for development the whole app has been dockerized and the setup is fairly well-documented. Features:

• Images use Alpine Linux to keep their size small.
• docker-compose.yml sets up and starts Postgres, Redis, Sidekiq, Rails and the Webpack dev server.
• Uses a persistent bundle cache, so there's no need to rebuild the image to add gems.
• Persistent volumes for Postgres and Redis.
• No exposed ports except for Rails (mapped to port 3000 by default)

The following files relate to our Docker setup:

• Dockerfile: main setup for the app container
• docker-compose.yml: Ties Postgres, Redis and app together
• docker-entrypoint.sh: Custom entry point to facilitate bundle caching
• Procfile.docker: Used by the entrypoint script to bring up services
• .dockerignore: similar to .gitignore, specifies files we don't want copied into the container

Start the environment and build the images if necessary:

$ docker-compose up --build
Building app
[Step 1/12 : FROM ruby:2-alpine
 ---> 8302cc790fbf
Step 2/12 : RUN apk update && apk add --update --no-cache   build-base   chromium   chromium-chromedriver   git   imagemagick   libxml2-dev   libxslt-dev   nodejs   tzdata   postgresql-dev
 ---> Using cache
 ---> 9d1d0b398c26
Step 3/12 : RUN bundle config build.nokogiri --use-system-libraries
 ---> Using cache
 ---> 0a5ca06d7700
Step 4/12 : WORKDIR /app
 ---> Using cache
 ---> c61498ba7e64
[...]

Start the environment without (re-)building images (add -d to daemonize):

$ docker-compose up
Starting rails_new_postgres_1 ... done
Starting rails_new_redis_1    ... done
Starting rails_new_app_1      ... done
Attaching to rails_new_postgres_1, rails_new_redis_1, rails_new_app_1
[...]

Stop the environment but keep the containers:

$ docker-compose stop
Stopping rails_new_app_1      ... done
Stopping rails_new_postgres_1 ... done
Stopping rails_new_redis_1    ... done

Stop the environment and remove the containers:

$ docker-compose down
Stopping rails_new_app_1      ... done
Stopping rails_new_postgres_1 ... done
Stopping rails_new_redis_1    ... done
Removing rails_new_app_1      ... done
Removing rails_new_postgres_1 ... done
Removing rails_new_redis_1    ... done
Removing network rails_new_default

Execute a command inside the app container:

$ docker-compose exec app ruby -v
ruby 2.5.1p57 (2018-03-29 revision 63029) [x86_64-linux-musl]

Execute a command inside the app container that needs env variables:

$ docker-compose exec --env RAILS_ENV=test app rails db:setup
Created database 'rails_new_test'
-- enable_extension("plpgsql")
   -> 0.0251s
-- create_table("users", {:force=>:cascade})
   -> 0.0366s

Adding a new gem (does not require image rebuild):

# update Gemfile
$ docker-compose exec app bundle

Running specs:

$ docker-compose exec app rspec
....................

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This project is MIT licensed, see LICENSE.