Suspenders

Suspenders is the base Rails application used at thoughtbot.

Installation

First install the suspenders gem:

gem install suspenders

Then run:

suspenders projectname

This will create a Rails 4.0 app in projectname.

By default this script creates a new git repository. See below if you want to use it against an existing repo.

Gemfile

To see the latest and greatest gems, look at Suspenders' Gemfile, which will be appended to the default generated projectname/Gemfile.

It includes application gems like:

• Airbrake for exception notification
• Bourbon for Sass mixins
• Delayed Job for background processing
• Email Validator for email validation
• Flutie for and body_class view helper
• High Voltage for static pages
• jQuery Rails for jQuery
• Neat for semantic grids
• Postgres for access to the Postgres database
• Rack Timeout to abort requests that are taking too long
• Recipient Interceptor to avoid accidentally sending emails to real people from staging
• Simple Form for form markup and style
• Unicorn to serve HTTP requests
• Title for storing titles in translations

And gems only for staging and production like:

• New Relic RPM for monitoring performance
• Rails 12 Factor to make running Rails 4 apps easier on Heroku

And development gems like:

• Dotenv for loading environment variables
• Pry Rails for debugging
• Spring for fast Rails actions via pre-loading

And testing gems like:

• Capybara and Capybara Webkit for integration testing
• Factory Girl for test data
• RSpec for unit testing
• RSpec Mocks for stubbing and spying
• Shoulda Matchers for common RSpec matchers
• Timecop for testing time

Other goodies

Suspenders also comes with:

• The ./bin/setup convention for new developer setup
• Rails' flashes set up and in application layout
• A few nice time formats set up for localization
• Rack::Deflater to compress responses with Gzip
• Fast-failing factories
• A low database connection pool limit
• Safe binstubs
• t() and l() in specs without prefixing with I18n

Suspenders fixes several of Rails' insecure defaults:

• Suspenders uses Unicorn instead of WEBrick, allowing less verbose Server headers.
• Suspenders is configured to pull your application secret key base from an environment variable, which means you won't need to risk placing it in version control.

Heroku

You can optionally create Heroku staging and production apps:

suspenders app --heroku true

This:

• Creates a staging and production Heroku app
• Sets them as staging and production Git remotes
• Configures staging with RACK_ENV and RAILS_ENV environment variables set to staging

Git

This will initialize a new git repository for your Rails app. You can bypass this with the --skip-git option:

suspenders app --skip-git true

GitHub

You can optionally create a GitHub repository for the suspended Rails app. It requires that you have Hub on your system:

curl http://hub.github.com/standalone -sLo ~/bin/hub && chmod +x ~/bin/hub
suspenders app --github organization/project

This has the same effect as running:

hub create organization/project

Dependencies

Suspenders requires Ruby 1.9.2 or greater.

Some gems included in Suspenders have native extensions. You should have GCC installed on your machine before generating an app with Suspenders.

Use OS X GCC Installer for Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6).

Use Command Line Tools for XCode for Lion (OS X 10.7) or Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8).

We use Capybara Webkit for full-stack Javascript integration testing. It requires QT. Instructions for installing QT are here.

PostgreSQL needs to be installed and running for the db:create rake task.

Issues

If you have problems, please create a Github Issue.

Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for details.

Credits

Suspenders is maintained and funded by thoughtbot, inc.

The names and logos for thoughtbot are trademarks of thoughtbot, inc.

License

Suspenders is Copyright © 2008-2014 thoughtbot. It is free software, and may be redistributed under the terms specified in the LICENSE file.