Bort: Better Skeleton Applications

We’re all familiar with the rails command-line tool. It generates a Rails skeleton application with everything you need to start your Rails application–directories, configuration, even a default index page.

But the more you develop Rails applications, the more you begin to realize that some tools and gems are valuable on every project. Need a user management system? Likely restful_authentication. Rails pagination slow? Grab will_paginate. Even things like setting sessions to use the database, or using MySQL instead of sqlite3 as your database.

Enter bort. Bort is a replacement of the standard skeleton application; it includes these features (and more), already setup and configurated to work out-of-the-box. And it is a bigger box–it includes:

• RESTful Authentication, for a RESTful user-management system (registering users, logging in, etc.). Even includes the forgotten password feature!
• User Roles, to make your application users easier to manage; includes a default admin role and an admin user.
• Will Paginate, an efficient, pretty pagination plugin. Beats the standard Rails pagination by ages!
• OpenID integration, in case you want to support OpenID with your users.
• Rspec, a better way to write tests.
• Exception Notifier, to email you when your application hiccups.
• Asset Packager, which combines javascript and CSS to save download time.
• Database Sessions, MySQL DB YAML, an application-wide layout file, and no default index.html and rails.png, all of which make your life a little easier.

This is a big step up from your standard Rails skeleton. Best of all, if you don’t use half of this stuff, it won’t affect you much; and it’ll be there when you need it.

So why wait? Grab bort from the GitHub page, and enjoy easier, quicker, better Rails applications–for free!

  Posted in Gems and Plugins

Rate this article:

(2 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

 Loading ...

---

Related Content

---