Suspenders

Suspenders is the base Rails application used at thoughtbot.

Installation

First install the suspenders gem:

gem install suspenders

Then run:

suspenders projectname

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

Associated services

• Enable Circle CI Continuous Integration
• Enable GitHub auto deploys to Heroku staging and review apps.

Gemfile

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

It includes application gems like:

• Autoprefixer Rails for CSS vendor prefixes
• Bourbon for Sass mixins
• Bitters for scaffold application styles
• Delayed Job for background processing
• Flutie for page_title and body_class view helpers
• High Voltage for static pages
• Honeybadger for exception notification
• jQuery Rails for jQuery
• Neat for semantic grids
• 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
• Simple Form for form markup and style
• Skylight for monitoring performance
• Title for storing titles in translations
• Puma to serve HTTP requests

And development gems like:

• Dotenv for loading environment variables
• Pry Rails for interactively exploring objects
• ByeBug for interactively debugging behavior
• Bullet for help to kill N+1 queries and unused eager loading
• 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 Bot 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

Other goodies

Suspenders 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.)

Heroku

You can optionally create Heroku staging and production apps:

suspenders app --heroku true

This:

• Creates a staging and production Heroku app
• Sets them as staging and production Git remotes
• Configures staging with HONEYBADGER_ENV environment variable set to staging
• Creates a Heroku Pipeline for review apps
• Schedules automated backups for 10AM UTC for both staging and production

You can optionally specify alternate Heroku flags:

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

See all possible Heroku flags:

heroku help create

Git

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

suspenders app --skip-git true

GitHub

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
suspenders app --github organization/project

This has the same effect as running:

hub create organization/project

Spring

Suspenders 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.

Dependencies

Suspenders requires the latest version of Ruby.

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

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.

Issues

If you have problems, please create a GitHub Issue.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Thank you, contributors!

License

Suspenders is Copyright © 2008-2017 thoughtbot. It is free software, and may be redistributed under the terms specified in the LICENSE file.

About thoughtbot

Suspenders is maintained and funded by thoughtbot, inc. The names and logos for thoughtbot are trademarks of thoughtbot, inc.

We love open source software! See our other projects. We are available for hire.