ThreddedCreateApp

Generates a Rails app with the Thredded forums engine installed.

See below for more information on the generated app.

Example screenshots of the generated app:

Pre-requisites

Git.
A supported database: PostgreSQL (recommended), MySQL v5.7+, or SQLite.
Ruby 2.3+.

You may also need some packages to compile Thredded dependencies. On Ubuntu, you can install all the required packages by running:

sudo apt-get install autoconf automake bison build-essential gawk git \
  libffi-dev libgdbm-dev libgmp-dev libncurses5-dev libpq-dev libreadline6-dev \
  libsqlite3-dev libtool libyaml-dev nodejs pkg-config ruby sqlite3

Usage

Install the gem and create your app:

gem install thredded_create_app

Installing the gem using system Ruby

When using the system Ruby on Mac or Linux (as opposed to RVM or rbenv), the command above will fail because only root can install gems system-wide.

Instead, install thredded_create_app with the --user flag:

gem install --user thredded_create_app

The above will install the gem to the ~/.gem/ directory.

Then, add the user gems bin directory to PATH.

Create your app

thredded_create_app myapp

By default, PostgreSQL will be used as the database. Alternatively, you can pass --database sqlite3 for SQLite, or --datase mysql2 for MySQL.

Run thredded_create_app --help for more information about the available options.

App generation

The app generator will do the steps below for you.

First, the rubygems package is updated and the latest versions of Rails and Bundler are installed.

Then, a Rails app is generated for use with the selected database.

Then, a git repository is initialized in the app directory. From here onwards, the app generator will commit the changes at each step.

RSpec is used as the testing framework, and some basic acceptance tests using capybara are added.

Devise is used as the authentication framework. Its default views are customized to add a user name field (display_name) to the registration form. The simple_form gem is used for the customized Devise views by default.

A basic responsive app layout with top bar navigation is added. A user profile page that displays some basic information about the user and their recent forum posts is also added.

The app comes with basic styles (~10KiB gzipped, including Thredded styles) that are written using Sass.

The app's JavaScript code is loaded asynchronously in production mode via the async attribute on the script tag. In development, the individual script files are not concatenated. With async they would load out-of-order, so defer is used instead.

NB: While loading scripts via async provides the best possible speed, a lot of JavaScript libraries do not support it. If you plan on adding JavaScript code, you might want to remove the async attribute from the javascript_include_tag in app/views/layouts/application.html.erb.

A Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml is generated for development. This is so that other engineers can spin up a development environment with a single command (docker-compose up).

A production configuration file for the puma Ruby web server is created. A Procfile process description file is also created. This file can be used by the Heroku hosting platform or the foreman app runner.

Lastly, the $APP database user is created and given rights to the app's development and test databases. Then, the database is created, the migrations are run, and the database is seeded with an admin user and a messageboard.

Finally, the tests are run, and the development web server is started at http://localhost:3000. To start the server yourself afterwards with:

bin/rails s

Next steps

To learn about customizing the forums, see the Thredded Readme.

To learn about customizing the authentication system, e.g. to require email confirmation or to add an OAuth login, see the Devise Readme.

To change the homepage, edit the view file at app/views/home/show.html.erb.

To change the app's styles, see the files in app/assets/stylesheets. The app is generated with a randomly selected primary theme color that you may want to change. You can find it in app/assets/stylesheets/_variables.scss.

You can contact the Thredded team via the Thredded chat room. Once you've deployed your app, please let us know that you are using Thredded by tweeting @thredded!

Deploying to Heroku

To deploy your app to Heroku, run:

gem install heroku # --user if using system ruby
# Create a heroku app and set the necessary environment variables
heroku create
heroku config:set RACK_ENV=production RAILS_ENV=production \
  SECRET_KEY_BASE="$(cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc 'a-zA-Z0-9' | fold -w 32 | head -n 1)"
# Deploy to heroku
git push heroku master
# Set up the database and some seed data (an admin user and a messageboard)
heroku run rake db:migrate db:seed
# Open the website in your default browser
heroku open

You can log in as the admin user with email admin@<app name>.com, password 123456.

E-mails

The app is now deployed, but you'll also need to set up emailing.

The easiest way to do this is via the Mailgun Heroku add-on.

Set the APP_HOST environment variable on Heroku so that the app knows its domain.

   heroku config:set APP_HOST='e.g. myapp.herokuapp.com'

Enable the Mailgun add-on:

   heroku addons:create mailgun:starter # Enable Mailgun with the free plan

Copy the following snippet into config/environments/production.rb:

   config.action_mailer.perform_deliveries = true
   config.action_mailer.raise_delivery_errors = true
   config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :smtp
   config.action_mailer.smtp_settings = {
       domain: Settings.hostname,
       port: ENV['MAILGUN_SMTP_PORT'],
       address: ENV['MAILGUN_SMTP_SERVER'],
       user_name: ENV['MAILGUN_SMTP_LOGIN'],
       password: ENV['MAILGUN_SMTP_PASSWORD'],
       authentication: :plain,
   }

Set the domain in the snippet above to your domain.

Commit and push to Heroku.

By default, emails are send from no-reply@. You can configure this in config/settings.yml.

Performance

You may also want to set the Ruby GC variables for maximum performance. You can either do so by profiling the app with the TuneMyGC Heroku add-on, or set these values obtained from profiling the Thredded Demo App:

# https://tunemygc.com/configs/e2cb38dac2fd4ff9fd9f32036e5e2688
heroku config:set \
  RUBY_GC_HEAP_INIT_SLOTS=308851 \
  RUBY_GC_HEAP_FREE_SLOTS=1382037 \
  RUBY_GC_HEAP_GROWTH_FACTOR=1.03 \
  RUBY_GC_HEAP_GROWTH_MAX_SLOTS=44771 \
  RUBY_GC_HEAP_OLDOBJECT_LIMIT_FACTOR=1.2 \
  RUBY_GC_MALLOC_LIMIT=29939911 \
  RUBY_GC_MALLOC_LIMIT_MAX=53891840 \
  RUBY_GC_MALLOC_LIMIT_GROWTH_FACTOR=1.32 \
  RUBY_GC_OLDMALLOC_LIMIT=24159191 \
  RUBY_GC_OLDMALLOC_LIMIT_MAX=43486544 \
  RUBY_GC_OLDMALLOC_LIMIT_GROWTH_FACTOR=1.2

In production, an app created with vanilla thredded_create_app will use around ~220 MiB of RAM per puma worker under load.

Deploying to a VPS or a bare-metal Ubuntu 16.04 server

See: https://github.com/thredded/thredded-ansible.

Development

The instructions below are for developing and contributing to the Thredded app generator itself, not for using it.

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To generate an app with thredded_create_app at tmp/myapp, run:

bundle exec bin/create-tmp-myapp

This command will clean up the previously generated app before creating a new one.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/thredded/thredded_create_app. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.