How I make rails apps

This is a quick step-by-step guide for how I've made my latest rails app. Check the edit date to know when it was updated. Duh. ;)

Run it on Heroku

It’s just easier... Who needs to mess with devops these days.

Create an account at heroku.com
Install the Heroku command line tools on your machine

Get your machine ready

Install Ruby (with Rbenv?)
Install rails (with brew? or just gem install rails?) ... I can't remember
Install postgress brew install postgres

OR.... use a VM

Install Virtualbox
Install Vagrant
Grab a Rails 5 box (e.g. jade/rails5...)
install homebrew
if you're having trouble accessing the network via curl you may need to configure proxies: add the followign to your ~/.bash_profie

export https_proxy=http://your.proxy.com:80
export http_proxy=http://other.proxy.com:80

Store your code on github

Your stuff is open source right? No? Why not?

Visit github.com, login, and make a new repo.
Select the Rails .gitignore template
Return to your local machine and clone the repo into a folder there.
Clone it locally and run

git clone [git_repo_url]
#use postgres for Heroku
rails new [git_repo_name] --database=postgresql

#create a new heroku app from here
heroku create [app_name]

Add a few gems to your Gemfile

#for GOV.UK template
gem 'govuk_template'
#gem 'slimmer'

#for other GOV.UK elements
gem 'govuk_elements_rails'

#for sass mixins
gem 'govuk_frontend_toolkit'

#slim templates
gem 'slim-rails'

#pagination
gem 'kaminari-bootstrap', '~> 3.0.1'

#bootstrap-generators
gem 'bootstrap-generators', '~> 3.3.4'

#for pretty select boxes
# use class="selectpicker"
gem 'bootstrap-select-rails'

Add the files, commit, and push

#commit the files and the Gemfile.lock so we can deploy to heroku
git add .
git commit -am "first commit"
git push

Deploy it

Go back to heroku and open your app (maybe star it for convenient access)
Click “Deploy" and click the “GitHub” button
Connect to Github, find your repo and connect it to your app
Click automatic deploys if you want this.
Back to your code, update your config/database.yml like so:

default: &default
  adapter: postgresql
  pool: 5
  encoding: unicode
  timeout: 5000

development:
  <<: *default
  database: infoshare_dev

test: &test
  <<: *default
  database: infoshare_test

cucumber:
  <<: *test

Run it locally

Make sure the database is running

#see how to start it (if you installed via brew)
brew info postgres
#Run whatever command the above recommends for your needs (e.g. run backround process or just keep it open in a shell)

#setup the databse
rake db:setup
rake db:migrate

Re-run bundler:
`bundle`

Create a Procfile that looks like this:

web: bundle exec puma -t 5:5 -p ${PORT:-3000} -e ${RACK_ENV:-development}

Start herou locally

heroku local

What's next?

Write some tests, create some models, migrate your database, create some views, commit re-deploy... rinse and repeat.

REMEMBER TO `heroku run rake db:migrate` when you need to migrate...

Heroku won't do this for you automagically

Testing with Cucumber

NOT FINISHED Add this to your Gemfile in the :develompent section (what about :test?)

  gem 'cucumber' #our testing framework
  gem 'selenium-webdriver' #usual, firefox driver
  gem 'phantomjs'
  gem 'poltergeist' #headless driver
  gem 'rspec' #gives us a few nice methods like "page.should"
  gem 'pry' # for command line debugging
  gem 'capybara-screenshot'
  gem 'firefox'
  #gem 'cucumber-rails', :require => false
  # database_cleaner is not required, but highly recommended
  gem 'database_cleaner'

now run cucumber --init to set up the folders, etc.

Wanna use the GOV.UK fronted?

Add these gems to your Gemfile

#for GOV.UK template
gem 'govuk_template'
#gem 'slimmer'

#for other GOV.UK elements
gem 'govuk_elements_rails'

#for sass mixins
gem 'govuk_frontend_toolkit'

You'll need to make a layouts/application.html.slim file. See here.

Oauth Authentication

Register your app on the Google console (if that's what you're using)
Get your client ID and secret
use a .env file to hold these in environment variables
Create a sessions controller with methods for new (basically redirects to the /auth URL), create (handles the callback), destroy (logs out),
Create "signed_in?" method in application_controller.rb
Add this, before_filter :check_login, :except=>[:welcome, :about] to allow non-logged in folk to see the welcome & about pages.
Add the "check_login" method..

Make it more robust:

Add a User model to hold name, email, is_admin? flag, etc.
Add a user controller to perform CRUD operations on Users

##Troubleshooting

Heroku complaining about secret keys?

Make sure you’ve committed your secrets.yml file (check you .gitignore)

peterkappus/how_i_make_rails_apps.md