Rails App Templates
The Underrated Game-Changer
Rails App Templates are perhaps the most underrated feature of Ruby on Rails, offering a powerful way to customize the setup of new Rails applications.
For more in-depth technical details, you can refer to the official Rails Guides 📚.
What are Rails Application Templates? 🤔
Rails Application Templates automate the process of setting up a new Rails application. You create instructions in a file using Ruby code to add gems, initialize configurations, add plugins, and other tasks, essentially streamlining the creation of a new Rails app.
These templates are useful for developers because they can:
Setup Gems: Automatically add and install a set of pre-defined gems that you use in every project 💎.
Configure Application: Set up environment variables, database configurations, or other application settings right from the start ⚙️.
Add Custom Code: Insert custom code or modify existing files to fit your preferred application structure or coding standards 👨💻👩💻.
Automate Tedious Tasks: Run database migrations, create initializers, generate models, controllers, views, and more 🔄.
When to Use Rails App Templates 📆
Starting New Projects
For software studios, when you want to have the same configs all the apps you will build, you can use the App Template feature of Rails to make your configs and gems consistent across different projects and clients.Educational Purposes
If you're teaching Rails, providing a template to students can help them skip the repetitive setup process and focus on learning the core aspects of Rails 🎓.Experimentation and Prototyping
When you need to quickly prototype ideas, having a template with your preferred stack ready to go can accelerate the process 🚀.
Building my own template 🌱
Since I plan to consistently write a tutorial blog this year, I opted to create my own template to streamline my process.
This template contains the following:
Setup Devise Gem
Setup Bootstrap Gem
Add a Homepage with Bootstrap
Updated the sign-in and sign-up of Devise to use Bootstrap design
I also uploaded the template on RailsByte.com for easy access.
The command for the Rails App Template is:
