Simple Experiments For Building Complex Rails Applications

I’m just using this post to note down what I usually do when setting up a new project, mostly as a reference page.

rails new appname
cd appname
git init .
rm public/index.html
rm app/assets/images/rails.png
git add .
git commit -m "Generated new app. Removed index.html and rails.png"
lime .

‘lime .’ opens up the project inside Sublime Text 2.

Add the following to Gemfile:

gem 'haml'
# gem 'devise'
# gem "cancan"
# gem 'stripe'
# gem 'launchy'
# gem 'carrierwave'
# gem 'rmagick'

gem 'rspec-rails'

group :test do
  gem "factory_girl_rails"
  gem "capybara"
  gem "capybara-webkit"
  gem "guard-rspec"
  gem 'growl'
  gem "ruby_gntp"
  gem 'database_cleaner'
  gem 'shoulda-matchers'
  gem 'shoulda-context'
end

group :production do
  gem 'pg'
end

You’ll notice a number of the gems above are commented out. That’s because they are gems I use frequently but I don’t want to add them at the beginning of the project. Also, I add the pg because most of my apps are deployed on Heroku and POSTgres is the database of choice on Heroku.

Next I run:

bundle install
rails g rspec:install
guard init rspec
mkdir spec/support spec/requests spec/models
rm -rf test

Next, I open up spec/spec_helper.rb and make it match the following:

ENV["RAILS_ENV"] ||= 'test'
require File.expand_path("../../config/environment", __FILE__)
require 'rspec/rails'
require 'rspec/autorun'
require 'capybara/rspec'
Capybara.javascript_driver = :webkit

# Requires supporting ruby files with custom matchers and macros, etc,
# in spec/support/ and its subdirectories.
Dir[Rails.root.join("spec/support/**/*.rb")].each {|f| require f}

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.include Factory::Syntax::Methods
  config.mock_with :rspec
  config.infer_base_class_for_anonymous_controllers = false
  config.use_transactional_fixtures = false

  config.before(:suite) do
    DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :truncation
  end 

  config.before(:each) do
    DatabaseCleaner.start
  end

  config.after(:each) do
    DatabaseCleaner.clean
  end
end

After this, I create /spec/factories.rb file with this:

FactoryGirl.define do
#   sequence :email do |n|
#     "email#{n}@example.com"
#   end

#   factory :user do
#     email { Factory.next(:email) }
#     password "password"
#     password_confirmation "password"
#     association :account
#   end
end

It’s mostly commented out to give me a quick example so I can remember the syntax easily. At this point I commit the changes:

git add .
git commit -m "Added factory_girl_rails, capybara, capybara-webkit, guard-rspec, growl_notify, database_cleaner, shoulda-matchers, shoulda-context and haml gems. Generated rspec setup files, added a factories.rb and updated spec_helper with capybara and databaase_cleaner settings."

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