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Ask HN: Help me improve my Rails 3 Environment. Please.
8 points by Rhodee on July 28, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments
I am new to ruby, played with Sinatra now want to try Rails 3. I am setting up my environment and came up with a checklist.

How would you improve it?

Here is what I have installed

Rake .9.2 Compass 0.11.5 Rails 3.0.7 Passenger 3.0.7 + a host of dependencies. My goal is to create an environment with Compass Framework, Passenger and jQuery.

Here are my steps -- Thanks for the feedback!

Create Rails App, Database & Server Instance (1) Run rails new prjName --using blueprint (2) Is httpd.conf file pointing to right file? (3) Delete /public/index.html.erb (4) Update Rakefile if using Rake 0.9.2

module ::applicationName class Application include Rake::DSL end end

module ::RakeFileUtils extend Rake::FileUtilsExt end

(5) Run rake db:create:all (optional)

(6) Run rails g scaffold modelName attr:DataType..

(7) Add to route.rb root :to => 'resource#action'

(8) Run rake db:migrate

(9) Go to migrate folder and confirm contents of date_create_resource.rb

(10) Add gem "rake", "~> 0.9.2" to Gemfile

Set up jQuery, Compass and Finish Up

(11) Run compass init rails add generated statement to Gemfile

(12)

Add gem "jquery-rails", "~> 1.0.12" to Gemfile (13)

Run rails generate jquery:install --ui (14)

Run compass init rails (to generate a sass folder)? I should not have to do this? Any Compass Users please help me understand why this is the case...

(15) Place js references in ERB file <%= javascript_include_tag"javascripts/jquery.min.js"%> <%= javascript_include_tag "javascripts/jquery-ui.min.js"%> <%= javascript_include_tag "javascripts/jquery-ui.min.js"%>

(16) Review, update Gemfile (jQuery,rake, compass)

(17) Update the compass.rb file

(18) Run bundle install

(19) Restart the server sudo apachectl graceful



You can do 95% of this (excluding Apache configuration) automatically with Rails templates.

My example is here https://github.com/prognostikos/rails_templates/blob/master/... and if you search github you can find many more.

Use with 'rails new yourapp --template=path/to/template'


@prognostikos - thanks man. I saw your template and came across a few others. I came across this gem (https://github.com/kfaustino/rails-templater) I might give it a go. I understand about 85% of your script so I am definitely going to try and create my own from all this inspiration.


no need to restart the server. if you're using passenger, just `$ touch tmp/restart.txt` (in your rails app). That will restart just that app in passenger (and lots of other servers too)


@lenary thank you very much for your feedback. I recall reading about the restart.txt - what contents should be in this file or is it generated?




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