Rail

A light framework for front-end development inspired by Rails. It is solely based on Sprockets and includes the following components out of the box:

• CoffeeScript for JavaScript,
• Haml for HTML,
• Sass for CSS, and
• Uglifier for compression.

Installation

First of all, include the gem in your Gemfile. Here is an example:

source 'https://rubygems.org'

gem 'rail', '~> 0.0.4'

# The rest is optional
gem 'redcarpet', '~> 3.1.2' # your favorit complement to Haml
gem 'thin', '~> 1.6.2'      # your favorit Web server

Then run Bundler:

$ bundle

Now we need to create three files: config/application.rb, config.ru, and Rakefile. In config/application.rb:

require 'bundler'
Bundler.require(:default)

module MyProject
  class Application < Rail::Application
  end
end

In config.ru:

require_relative 'config/application'

run MyProject::Application.new

In Rakefile:

require_relative 'config/application'

MyProject::Application.load_tasks

Feel free to replace MyProject with the name of your project. That’s it.

Usage

Rail closely follows Rails. If you know Rails, you already know Rail.

Structure

Organize your code according to the following convention:

• app/assets/javascripts for scripts,
• app/assets/stylesheets for styles,
• app/views for templates,
• app/helpers for helper modules, and
• public for other static content.

In addition, app/views/layouts/application.html.haml will be used for rendering the root of your application (both / and /index.html).

Configuration

As with Rails, Rail is configured inside config/application.rb:

module MyProject
  class Application < Rail::Application
    # Import assets from other gems:
    config.gems << 'turbolinks'

    # Precompile assets using `rake assets`:
    config.precompile << 'application.css'
    config.precompile << 'application.js'
    config.precompile << 'index.html'

    # Compress assets:
    config.compress = true
  end
end

If config.compress is not specified, it is implicitly set to ENV['RAIL_ENV'] == 'production'.

Commands

Run Rake to see the available tasks:

$ rake -T
rake assets  # Precompile assets
rake server  # Start server

rake server starts up a Web server; if none is specified in Gemfile, WEBrick will be fired up.

rake assets compiles your assets and stores them in public. You should explicitly tell Rail what to compile as it was shown in the previous section. Note that the server will try to serve from public first, so make sure you delete the precompiled files when you change your code in app.

Examples

Additional usage examples can be found here, here, and here.

Contributing

1. Fork the project.
2. Create a branch for your feature (git checkout -b awesome-feature).
3. Implement your feature (vim).
4. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Implemented an awesome feature').
5. Push to the branch (git push origin awesome-feature).
6. Create a new Pull Request.