Shinkansen

Spin up well-configured Rails apps in minutes rather than hours. A personal-flavored fork of Gypsum, which itself was a fork of Prologue.

Installation

$ gem install shinkansen

Usage

$ shinkansen new some_project
$ cd some_project
$ rails s

A git repository is initialized and commit to after generating the initial stock Rails app. You can get a sense for which configuration changes Shinkansen has made by doing:

$ git diff

Once you've reviewed those changes and are satisfied, you should do an initial:

$ git add -A
$ git commit -m "Initial commit from Shinkansen."

Thanks

Shinkansen is a fork

What's in the Box

Tools of the Trade

• Ruby on Rails
• Haml
• Sass
• CoffeeScript

All generated ERB files are converted to Haml.

Authentication and Authorization

Authentication and authorization are provided by devise and cancan. We've also kept Quickleft's out-of-the-box implementation for users having many roles and simple checking of roles like so:

user.is?(:admin)

A sample admin user (admin@example.org) and regular user (user@example.org) is created as well. The password for both accounts is password!

Admin Console

Customers can manage their data easily using rails_admin.

Helpers

Dates

Format your times and dates naturally with stamp:

%p You last signed in on #{current_user.last_sign_in_at.stamp('Saturday, January 1, 2012')}

Grammar

Present grammatically correct possessives like Andrew's and Silas' with possessive:

%h2= #{user.name.possessive} Friends

Randomness

Fetch random records using randumb

@five_friends = user.friends.random(5)

Cross-Browser CSS3

Use CSS3 with confidence with bourbon's Sass mixins.

Convert Markdown to HTML

Converting Markdown to HTML is a great way to let users format their content, which I use BlueCloth for.

.content
  = BlueCloth.new(@user.profile).to_html.html_safe

We typically just role that into a markdown() view helper, but haven't included that yet.

File Attachments

In addition to including paperclip by default, I also include paperclip-s3 which means you don't need any configuration code for file attachments to work on Heroku. Instead, just create a bucket and register the details like so:

heroku config:add S3_BUCKET=your_bucket_name
heroku config:add S3_KEY=your_access_key
heroku config:add S3_SECRET=your_secret_key

Scalability

Write code that scales better with delayed_job.

Usability

Report on Validation Errors

Find out which validation errors you users run into again-and-again with tripwire_notifier.

Parse Natural Language Dates

Or any format really, with chronic

Responsive Development without Command + Tab

Automatic in-browser refreshing on page save with guard-livereload and rack-livereload. When you have a guard process running from the project directory, pages will automatically refresh when you save Haml, assets, view helpers, locales, etc.

$ guard

User-friendly and SEO-friendly URLs

That's what friendly_id is for. (Note to self, I should add this to users by default as an example.)

The Testing Suite

• rspec
• capybara and capybara-webkit
• shoulda-matchers
• webmock
• vcr
• email_spec
• timecop
• factory_girl_rails