EmberCLI Rails

EmberCLI Rails is an integration story between (surprise suprise) EmberCLI and Rails. It is designed to provide an easy way to organize your Rails backed EmberCLI application with a specific focus on upgradeability. Rails and Ember [slash EmberCLI] are maintained by different teams with different goals. As such, we believe that it is important to ensure smooth upgrading of both aspects of your application.

A large contingent of Ember developers use Rails. And Rails is awesome. With the upcoming changes to Ember 2.0 and the Ember community's desire to unify around EmberCLI it is now more important than ever to ensure that Rails and EmberCLI can coexist and development still be fun!

To this end we have created a minimum set of features (which we will outline below) to allow you keep your Rails workflow while minimizing the risk of upgrade pain with your Ember build tools.

For example, end-to-end tests with frameworks like Cucumber should just work. You should still be able leverage the asset pipeline, and all the conveniences that Rails offers. And you should get all the new goodies like ES6 modules and EmberCLI addons too! Without further ado, let's get in there!

Installation

Firstly, you'll have to include the gem in your Gemfile and bundle install

gem "ember-cli-rails"

Then you'll want to configure your installation by adding an ember.rb initializer. There is a generator to guide you, run:

rails generate ember-cli:init

This will generate an initializer that looks like the following:

EmberCLI.configure do |c|
  c.app :frontend
end
options

  • app - this represents the name of the ember cli application. The presumed path of which would be Rails.root.join('app', <your-appname>)

  • path - used if you need to override the default path (mentioned above). Example usage:

EmberCLI.configure do |c|
  c.app :frontend, path: "/path/to/your/ember-cli-app/on/disk"
end

Once you've updated your initializer to taste, you need to install the ember-cli-rails-addon.

For each of your EmberCLI applications install the addon with:

npm install --save-dev [email protected]

And that's it!

Multiple EmberCLI apps

In the initializer you may specify multiple EmberCLI apps, each of which can be referenced with the view helper independently. You'd accomplish this like so:

EmberCLI.configure do |c|
  c.app :frontend
  c.app :admin_panel, path: "/somewhere/else"
end

Usage

You render your Ember CLI app by including the corresponding JS/CSS tags in whichever Rails view you'd like the Ember app to appear.

For example, if you had the following Rails app

# /config/routes.rb
Rails.application.routes.draw do
  root 'application#index'
end

# /app/controllers/application_controller.rb
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  def index
    render :index
  end
end

and if you had created an Ember app :frontend in your initializer, then you could render your app at the / route with the following view:

<!-- /app/views/application/index.html.erb -->
<%= include_ember_script_tags :frontend %>
<%= include_ember_stylesheet_tags :frontend %>

Your Ember application will now be served at the / route.

Enabling LiveReload

In order to get LiveReload up and running with EmberCLI Rails, you can install guard and guard-livereload gems, run guard init and then add the following to your Guardfile.

guard "livereload" do
  # ...
  watch %r{app/<your-appname>/\w+/.+\.(js|hbs|html|css|<other-extensions>)}
  # ...
end

This tells Guard to watch your EmberCLI app for any changes to the JavaScript, Handlebars, HTML, or CSS files. Take note that other extensions can be added to the line (such as coffee for CoffeeScript) to watch them for changes as well.

Additional Information

When running in the development environment, EmberCLI Rails runs ember build with the --output-path and --watch flags on. The --watch flag tells EmberCLI to watch for file system events and rebuild when an EmberCLI file is changed. The --output-path flag specifies where the distribution files will be put. EmberCLI Rails does some fancy stuff to get it into your asset path without polluting your git history. Note that for this to work, you must have config.consider_all_requests_local = true set in config/environments/development.rb, otherwise the middleware responsible for building Ember CLI will not be enabled.

Contributing

  1. Fork it (https://github.com/rwz/ember-cli-rails/fork)
  2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
  3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
  4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
  5. Create a new Pull Request