Rocket Mobile: Base Rails Application

This base application is meant to give a common/recommended Rails app setup. It exhibits gem and convention choices that work and scale well togther. Based on experience, these conventions and gems can be used to achieve 90% of the features required of most web apps.

Cloning from this template

• Fork the repo
• Replace all instances of 'hyde_park_spirit_store' with 'your-app-name' in project directory
• Replace all instances of 'HydeParkSpiritStore' with 'YourAppName' in project directory
• Rename project directory to 'your-app-name'
• If you're OCD, Replace the token in config/initializers/secret_token.rb with a token generated by running SecureRandom.base64(128)

Now, reconfigure .git/config to point to your repo (so you don't try to push back to the hyde_park_spirit_store repo), and you're good to go.

  [remote "origin"]
    url = git@github.com:<your-user-or-organization-name>/<your-repo-name>
    fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*

Getting Started

• A Pages controller exists for you in app/controllers/pages_controller

• A dynamic home page exists for you in app/views/pages/home.haml

• A dynamic layout exists for you in app/views/layouts/application.haml

• Zurb Foundation 4 is set up as the styling framework

• Run rails s and navigate to localhost:3000 to get started!

Deploying

This setup 'just works' on the Heroku PaaS stack.

heroku apps:create rails-base-app
git push heroku master

You can now run heroku open to visit rails-base-app.herokuapp.com and get the root of the deployed application.

Optimizations

Production

• Avoid server idling using New Relic Availability Monitoring
  • heroku addons:add newrelic
  • heroku addons:open newrelic to set up availability monitoring (Settings » Availability monitoring)
• Host assets remotely using S3
  • Add AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, and AWS_BUCKET config variables
  • Make these variables available during precompile with heroku labs:enable user_env_compile
  • Deploy again by pushing new code to the heroku remote
• Host assets with regional edge caches using CloudFront
  • Set up a CloudFront distribution with your S3 bucket as the origin
  • Add the CDN_HOST config variable with your distribution's domain name, without the protocol (ex: d3fsl83hdxp1.cloudfront.net)
• Put site behind basic authentication while under development or for staging
  • Add the BASIC_AUTH_USER and BASIC_AUTH_PASSWORD config variables
• Analyze traffic with Google Analytics
  • Add the GOOGLE_TRACKING_CODE config variable, with your tracking code
• Increase search engine rank by forcing production traffic to a single domain
  • Add the FORCE_DOMAIN config variable with the desired domain name, without the protocol (ex: www.example.com)

Development

• Speed your tests using Spork
  • In a first terminal window, bundle exec spork will start a Spork server
  • In a second terminal window, rspec will now run RSpec instantly without waiting for app initialization
  • You can still run bundle exec rspec without Spork for one-off tests

Feature Examples

See the wiki for instructions for the following:

• [How to send email](/wiki/How to send email)

hyde_park_spirit_store TODO

• Comment out optional gems with descriptions
• Create script to rename app with single command
• Put JS OO architecture example in place
• Make favicon.ico use asset pipeline
• Dynamic 500 page