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!