Bowties

Bowties is the base Rails application used at Wizard Development forked from the wonderful suspenders project in use at thoughtbot.

We work a bit differently. Suspenders has the defaults that makes sense for thoughtbot and Bowties has defaults that make sense for us. You can find our current best practices in our development guides.

First install the Bowties gem:

gem install bowties

Then run:

bowties projectname

This will create a Rails app in projectname using the latest version of Rails.

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

It includes application gems like:

• Airbrake for exception notification
• Autoprefixer Rails for CSS vendor prefixes
• Bourbon for Sass mixins
• Bitters for scaffold application styles
• Delayed Job for background processing
• Email Validator for email validation
• Flutie for page_title and body_class view helpers
• High Voltage for static pages
• jQuery Rails for jQuery
• Neat for semantic grids
• New Relic RPM for monitoring performance
• Normalize for resetting browser styles
• Postgres for access to the Postgres database
• Rack Canonical Host to ensure all requests are served from the same domain
• Rack Timeout to abort requests that are taking too long
• Recipient Interceptor to avoid accidentally sending emails to real people from staging
• Refills for “copy-paste” components and patterns based on Bourbon, Neat and Bitters
• Simple Form for form markup and style
• Title for storing titles in translations
• Unicorn 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
• Web Console for better debugging via in-browser IRB consoles.

And testing gems like:

• Capybara and Capybara Webkit for integration testing
• Factory Girl for test data
• Formulaic for integration testing HTML forms
• RSpec for unit testing
• RSpec Mocks for stubbing and spying
• Shoulda Matchers for common RSpec matchers
• Timecop for testing time

Bowties 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
• Configuration for CircleCI Continuous Integration (tests)
• Configuration for Hound Continuous Integration (style)
• The analytics adapter Segment (and therefore config for Google Analytics, Intercom, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, etc.)

You can optionally create Heroku staging and production apps:

bowties 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:

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

See all possible Heroku flags:

heroku help create

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

bowties app --skip-git true

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
bowties app --github organization/project

This has the same effect as running:

hub create organization/project

Bowties uses spring by default. It makes Rails applications load faster, but it might introduce confusing issues around stale code not being refreshed. If you think your application is running old code, run spring stop. And if you'd rather not use spring, add DISABLE_SPRING=1 to your login file.

Bowties requires the latest version of Ruby.

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

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).

We use Capybara Webkit for full-stack JavaScript integration testing. It requires QT. Instructions for installing QT are here.

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

If you have problems, please create a GitHub Issue.

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Thank you, contributors and thoughtbot!

• Update CHANGES.md with release info
• Update version number in /lib/bowties/version.rb
• ensure master is up to date
• rake release

Bowties is Copyright © 2015 Wizard Development. It is free software, and may be redistributed under the terms specified in the LICENSE file.

Bowties is maintained and funded by Wizard Development.

We love open source software! We are available for hire.