Rails Example Applications

Best Rails Example Applications

Daniel Kehoe — Wed, 25 May 2011 22:29:48 +0000

If you are looking for Rails example applications for Rails 3.1 you must take a look at the “Crazy Deep” Rails Example Apps hosted on GitHub. Each is accompanied by detailed Rails Tutorials and Rails application templates that can be used to generate a starter app. These example apps have become quite popular and there’s a lot of effort among Rails developers to keep the examples current.

Here’s a list of the available example apps:

Rails Subdomains With Authentication

Daniel Kehoe — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 22:36:18 +0000

FOR RAILS 3.0: See my Github repo for a complete example implementation of Rails 3 subdomains with authentication (including a detailed tutorial). It’s much easier to implement subdomains in Rails 3 than in Rails 2.3. Still there’s a few tricks to solve some common problems which you can see in the new example.

FOR RAILS 2.3:
I’ve released an open source application for Rails 2.3 that shows how to integrate subdomains with authentication.

User management and authentication is implemented using the Devise gem. The subdomain_routes gem implements subdomains and routing.

You can use this project as a starting point for any Rails web application that requires subdomains and authentication. You can easily customize the application for your own needs.

You can obtain the source code here:

http://github.com/fortuity/subdomain-authentication

A complete walkthrough tutorial is available on the GitHub wiki. The tutorial documents each step I followed to create the application:

View the Tutorial

This application implements a particular scenario where subdomains are required. There is a “main” domain where anyone can visit and create a user account. There is an “admin” subdomain for the exclusive use of administrators. And registered users can create any number of subdomains which could host blogs or other types of sites. This approach is familiar to users of sites such as wordpress.com and can be called “blog-style subdomains in Rails”.

Rails RESTful Authentication Example Application

Daniel Kehoe — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:22:59 +0000

FOR RAILS 3.0: A newer and more current Rails authentication example app shows how to set up Rails with the Devise authentication gem. It’s got a detailed Rails authentication tutorial plus an application template that can be used to generate a starter app. It shows how to use RSpec and Cucumber for testing with Devise as well. There’s a similar example app that shows how to set up Devise for authentication with the Mongoid gem and MongoDB database for quick development without schemas or migrations.

UPDATE: Rails has advanced since this application was released in mid-2008. As of February 2010, Rails is currently at version 2.3.5 (and Rails 3 is in beta). Several Rails gems are now available that provide a turnkey authentication solution, including Authlogic, Devise, and Clearance. You can also look at Technoweenie’s restful-authentication generator. The Ruby Toolbox page for Rails Authentication shows which are most popular. I personally recommend Devise.

I’ve released an open source Rails application that provides an example of RESTful Authentication.

It provides a complete system for managing users, including sign up and verification of a new user’s email address, login with role-based access control, and a system of resetting forgotten passwords, all using a RESTful architecture.

You can easily customize the application for your own needs.

You can obtain the source code here:

http://github.com/fortuity/origin_restful_authentication/tree/master

It is based on recommendations from the forum discussion Restful Authentication With All the Bells and Whistles.

GitHub Tips: Removing a Remote Branch

Daniel Kehoe — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:13:08 +0000

If you are working on a branch and want to abandon it, what do you do?

It’s easy to remove it from your local repository:
$ git branch -d mybranch # delete branch "mybranch"

And then how do you remove it from a GitHub repository? This works:

$ git push git@github.com:/.git :heads/

But there’s an easier way. Scott Chacon suggests:

You can also do (assuming ‘origin’ is the name of your remote):
git push origin :mybranch
Scott Chacon is the author of the Git Internals book from Peepcode.

Interaction Design Resources

Daniel Kehoe — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 19:21:07 +0000

Most web applications are built by teams of software developers and graphic designers. When software developers build their own sites, they tend to reuse designs they’ve used before or borrow from sites they like. Sometimes they’ll ask a graphic designer to create a few icons or propose a fresh look and feel. For their part, graphic designers tend to want to create the kind of eye-catching design that will win design awards for innovation and creativity. In my experience, most developers and designers are only dimly aware that there is a profession called “Interaction Design.” With any profession, there is a body of knowledge and expertise, and in Interaction Design, it’s all devoted to developing the optimal user experience. Most web applications need interaction design. At a minimum, developers and designers would do well to familiarize themselves with the accumulated body of knowledge from the interaction design field. And, if possible, get an interaction design expert on your team.

I’ve begun collecting favorite sources of information about interaction design:

and I’ll add to this list as I find more.

Open Source Social Network Apps for Rails

Daniel Kehoe — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 01:54:51 +0000

I’ve been looking for a Rails example app that demonstrates “best practice” development techniques and provides basic features, to be used as a “skeleton” starting point for development of a new project.

I’m primarily interested in finding an app that is written for Rails 2.0, that implements a RESTful architecture, and uses RSpec for specifications/testing. Optimally, it should implement authentication (using restful_authentication) and authorization, provide an interface for users to manage their accounts (or profiles), and provide a rudimentary administrative interface for adding or deleting users. I’ve looked at a number of open source apps (see the post Survey of Rails Example Applications).

There are three open source social network apps for Rails that come close to fulfilling my requirements. I’ll compare them here.

LovdbyLess is a social network platform from the development firm Less Everything. It is hosted on GitHub at stevenbristol/lovd-by-less. It is RESTful and uses Rails 2.0 but not RSpec or restful_authentication.

RailsCoders is the example app from the book Practical Rails Social Networking Sites, published by Apress. It’s a full-featured app and it is RESTful. The author chose to implement his own authentication (using RESTful principles) rather than using the restful_authentication plugin. The app was written for Rails 1.2.3, not Rails 2.0, but an upgrade is relatively easy. It has Test::Unit tests but not RSpec specifications/tests. As of April 11, 2008, it is hosted on GitHub at abradburne/railscoders, where the author has begun work on a new version of the app.

The authors Michael Hartl and Aurelius Prochazka built a social network app named RailsSpace for a book of the same name. RailsSpace doesn’t meet my minimal requirements (not Rails 2.0, not RESTful, no RSpec) but Michael Hartl is taking the lead in developing a new social network app named Insoshi, which improves on RailsSpace. It is hosted on GitHub and development has been funded by Y Combinator, a venture capital incubator. Insoshi is a Rails 2.0 app, full-featured and RESTful, uses restful_authentication and RSpec, and thus meets my requirements.

Getting Started With Git and GitHub Hosting

Daniel Kehoe — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 23:08:18 +0000

The most popular revision control system for an open source Rails app is Git.

I installed Git using MacPorts with
sudo port install git-core.

After installing Git, I installed the Git bundle for TextMate.

I signed up for Git hosting at GitHub. The process is nearly self-explanatory but I consulted two tutorials, A Tutorial Introduction to Git and Setting up a new Rails app with Git. I discovered I needed to create an ssh public/private key pair on my local machine and add the public key to my GitHub profile before I could push the app to the GitHub repository.

I’ve found two screencasts about using Git wih Rails, from PeepCode and Using Git to Manage and Deploy your Rails Apps from Scott Chacon.

GitHub has their own Git Guides but the best instructions I’ve found for using Git are the Git Guides from the Insoshi open source project.

Subversion or Git: Which Likes Me More?

Daniel Kehoe — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 20:40:17 +0000

I start any project with a revision control system. On projects of any complexity, I know you absolutely need the ability to make notes about what you’ve changed every time you make an improvement. And you need the ability to roll back to an earlier version when your improvements weren’t improvements. You also get the bonus of off-site backup of your code (assuming you use one of the many no-cost or low-cost repository hosting services).

A few years ago, the only alternative to proprietary revision control systems was the open source CVS. On occasions, it could make grown-ups cry. Subversion (SVN) has become more popular recently and it’s widely used on both open source and closed projects.

If I’m doing a project just for myself or my minions (that is, with a single point of ultimate authority), svn is the best choice. There’s nothing extra needed when you want to use svn on Mac OS X version 10.5 (Leopard); it is included when you install the Developer Tools package. You’ll just need to sign up for a repository hosting service.

For an open source project, there are good reasons to prefer Git, as detailed here by Dr Nic Williams. Git is the distributed revision control system created by Linus Torvalds (the creator of Linux). The most popular choice for a Git repository hosting service is GitHub.

Hosting and Development at Heroku

Daniel Kehoe — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 00:23:46 +0000

For a well-funded start-up, there’s no web application hosting better than Engine Yard. I’ve used them and the level of support is better than I’ve experienced from any other hosting provider. With Engine Yard you get a team of sysadmins and application programming gurus who are leaders in the Rails community. You’ll pay for it (close to a thousand dollars per month for a staging server and redundant production servers) but it’s a better bargain than any other alternative if you’re rolling out a web app for the world to use.

If you’re not well-funded or ready to go live to the world with your web application, there are a dozen or more web hosting providers that specialize in hosting Rails web apps and will charge you less than $30/month for a virtual server. I’ve used MediaTemple and DreamHost. You get what you pay for and that often includes configuration headaches when you’d rather be coding.

You might prefer a newer approach, from Morph Exchange. They reduce the configuration overhead for deploying a Rails app.

There’s another alternative: Heroku. See the discussion here. James, Adam, and Orion have this crazy idea that you should be able to develop a Rails app and host it with zero configuration. And then use your web browser to edit the code! You sign up for an account and that’s it. Not only can you upload an existing web app and see it run immediately, but you can create a Rails app, or upload and edit an existing app, right in the Firefox web browser. This is an amazing alternative to the conventional model of developing an app locally and deploying it to a remote hosting platform.

The Heroku approach makes a lot of sense when you’re building an app to learn Rails. Or when you are in the early stages of development and need a way to show your collaborators (or potential customers) what you’re working on. Or if you are running any sort of web app that has no revenue stream to support it.

Learning to Use RSpec

Daniel Kehoe — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 20:52:35 +0000

Most of the “Intro to Rails” books show how to develop web apps by writing code and then tests. (The more sophisticated books advise to write the tests and then write the code.) The books give good examples of using the built-in Test::Unit facility. But many experienced Rails developers are now using RSpec. There’s only one book I’ve seen that covers RSpec and that’s Obie Fernandez’s The Rails Way. The book doesn’t really explain why so many developers are moving to RSpec; for that, see an article by Dan North or an article by Dave Astels. They argue that we should be writing specifications, not tests.

There are a few tutorials that introduce RSpec, notably a series on the O’Reilly Network on Behavior Driven Development Using Ruby, with Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. There are also four Peepcode screencasts, starting with RSpec Basics.

RSpec is in the midst of rapid development and there are enough differences between RSpec version 1.1.0, which introduced new functionality (“user stories’), and earlier versions which are covered in the tutorials, that it is possible to get confused.

With so much rapid development of RSpec, the best place to get guidance is the Rspec Users mailing list.

Just a note, you might want to install the Textmate bundle for RSpec.