Blank: A Starter App for r_c and shoulda Users

Oct 10, 2008

Bort was released recently. Peter Cooper speculated that "...it could well catch on as the de facto bare bones / generic Rails application". But, what about us non-RSpec users? There are dozens of us, I tell you. Dozens!

We build a lot of apps at GiraffeSoft — we love to experiment with whatever ideas excite us on any given day. We're all sick of editing restful_auth code, and moving tests over to Shoulda and the one assertion per test pattern. Bort doesn't suit our needs. So, blank was born.

Right now, it's pretty simple. It has authentication, and forgot password. That's about it. But, it's no biggie. Since blank creates your new app as a git repo that shares history with blank's repo, you can pull in changes we make at any time. So, when we finally get around to implementing openid support, you'll get it for free, if you start with blank.

Vendored

All of our standard tools (and rails) are vendored:

  • active_presenter
  • andand
  • attribute_fu
  • hoptoad
  • mocha
  • rake
  • restful_authentication
  • ruby-openid
  • will_paginate

Installation

Installing blank is as easy as running a rake task. Except that blank uses thor instead, because it’s the new hotness, and it supports remote tasks.

Just install thor:

$ sudo gem install thor

…then install blank’s thor tasks:

$ thor install http://github.com/giraffesoft/blank/tree/master%2Fthorfiles%2Fblank.thor?raw=true

…then you’re ready to create a new app with blank:

$ thor blank:new_app the_name_of_my_app the@git.repo.it.will.live.in

That’s it! The thorfile will display a couple of rake notes where you should replace blank app with your app's name. Also, you'll want to fill in your hoptoad API key in config/initializers/hoptoad.rb.

If we improve the thor file, all you have to do is run:

$ thor update blank

before creating your next app, and you’ll get the changes automagically.

Development

All development will be done at the github repo. Fork away :)

Credits

Blank was created by me, with contributions from Daniel Haran.