Brace

Brace is a base Rails application.

Installation

First install the brace gem:

gem install brace

Then run:

brace projectname

This will create a Rails app in projectname.

Gemfile

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

It includes application gems like:

• Rollbar for exception notification
• Bourbon for Sass mixins
• Bitters for scaffold application styles
• Devise for user authentication
• Stripe for payments
• Sidekiq for background processing
• Email Validator for email validation
• High Voltage for static pages
• jQuery Rails for jQuery
• React Rails for React Components
• 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
• Refills for “copy-paste” components and patterns based on Bourbon, Neat and Bitters
• Title for storing titles in translations
• Puma to serve HTTP requests

And development gems like:

• Dotenv for loading environment variables
• Pry Rails for interactively exploring objects
• ByeBug for interactively debugging behavior
• Bundler Audit for scanning the Gemfile for insecure dependencies based on published CVEs
• Spring for fast Rails actions via pre-loading
• Better Errors for better debugging via in-browser IRB consoles.

And testing gems like:

• Factory Girl for test data
• RSpec for unit testing
• RSpec Mocks for stubbing and spying
• Shoulda Matchers for common RSpec matchers
• Timecop for testing time

Other goodies

Brace also comes with:

• The ./bin/setup convention for new developer setup
• The ./bin/deploy convention for deploying to Heroku
• 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
• The analytics adapter Segment (and therefore config for Google Analytics, Intercom, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, etc.)

Heroku

You can optionally create Heroku staging and production apps:

brace 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 Stdout Logging gem to configure the app to log to standard out, which is how Heroku's logging works.

You can optionally specify alternate Heroku flags:

brace app \
  --heroku true \
  --heroku-flags "--region eu --addons newrelic,pgbackups,sendgrid,ssl"

See all possible Heroku flags:

heroku help create

Git

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

brace 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
brace app --github organization/project

This has the same effect as running:

hub create organization/project

Dependencies

Brace requires the latest version of Ruby.

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

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).

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

Credits

Brace is an extension of thoughtbot, inc's suspenders. Thanks thoughtbot for making a great Rails templating gem.

License

Brace is free software, and may be redistributed under the terms specified in the LICENSE file.