Jumpstart

Jumpstart is the base Rails application used at thoughtbot.

Jumpstart boy

Installation

First install the jumpstart gem:

gem install jumpstart

Then run:

jumpstart projectname

This will create a Rails app in projectname using the latest version of Rails.

Gemfile

To see the latest and greatest gems, look at Jumpstart' Gemfile, which will be appended to the default generated projectname/Gemfile.

It includes application gems like:

Airbrake for exception notification
Bourbon for Sass mixins
Bitters for scaffold application styles
Delayed Job for background processing
Email Validator for email validation
Flutie for and body_class view helper
High Voltage for static pages
jQuery Rails for jQuery
Neat for semantic grids
New Relic RPM for monitoring performance
Normalize for resetting browser styles
Postgres for access to the Postgres database
Rack Timeout to abort requests that are taking too long
Recipient Interceptor to avoid accidentally sending emails to real people from staging
Simple Form for form markup and style
Title for storing titles in translations
Unicorn to serve HTTP requests

And development gems like:

Dotenv for loading environment variables
Pry Rails for interactively exploring objects
ByeBug for interactively debugging behavior
Spring for fast Rails actions via pre-loading

And testing gems like:

Capybara and Capybara Webkit for integration testing
Factory Girl for test data
Formulaic for integration testing HTML forms
RSpec for unit testing
RSpec Mocks for stubbing and spying
Shoulda Matchers for common RSpec matchers
Timecop for testing time

Other goodies

Jumpstart also comes with:

The ./bin/setup convention for new developer setup
Rails' flashes set up and in application layout
A few nice time formats set up for localization
Rack::Deflater to compress responses with Gzip
A low database connection pool limit
Safe binstubs
t() and l() in specs without prefixing with I18n
An automatically-created SECRET_KEY_BASE environment variable in all environments.
Configuration for Travis Pro continuous integration.
The analytics adapter Segment.io (and therefore config for Google Analytics, Intercom, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, etc.).

Heroku

You can optionally create Heroku staging and production apps:

jumpstart app --heroku true

This:

Creates a staging and production Heroku app
Sets them as staging and production Git remotes
Configures staging with RACK_ENV and RAILS_ENV environment variables set to staging
Adds the Rails 12 Factor gem to make running Rails 4 apps easier on Heroku

Git

This will initialize a new git repository for your Rails app. You can bypass this with the --skip-git option:

jumpstart app --skip-git true

GitHub

You can optionally create a GitHub repository for the suspended Rails app. It requires that you have Hub on your system:

curl http://hub.github.com/standalone -sLo ~/bin/hub && chmod +x ~/bin/hub
jumpstart app --github organization/project

This has the same effect as running:

hub create organization/project

Dependencies

Jumpstart requires the latest version of Ruby.

Some gems included in Jumpstart have native extensions. You should have GCC installed on your machine before generating an app with Jumpstart.

Use OS X GCC Installer for Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6).

Use Command Line Tools for XCode for Lion (OS X 10.7) or Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8).

We use Capybara Webkit for full-stack JavaScript integration testing. It requires QT. Instructions for installing QT are here.

PostgreSQL needs to be installed and running for the db:create rake task.

Issues

If you have problems, please create a GitHub Issue.

Contributing

To update Jumpstart' Ruby version, change .ruby-version and .travis.yml.

Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for further details.

Credits

Jumpstart is maintained and funded by thoughtbot, inc.

The names and logos for thoughtbot are trademarks of thoughtbot, inc.