Announcing Appsta 1.1.0
Worked a bit on tidying Appsta up this evening, and made a few decisions that will hopefully make it a bit more useful, and also hopefully get a few more people interested in using and contributing to it!
Appsta is at its core a library of helper methods for use in Rails templates, to help you build useful Rails app creation scripts that can cut down the amount of time it takes for you to get a new Rails app up and running with your standard setup. Everyone makes some initial modifications every time they break out the "rails" command, and by encapsulating this in a Rails template, you can save some time. Appsta added helper methods for setting up projects on GitHub, and setting up hosting environments on Heroku, amongst other things.
Appsta 1.0.0 also included a command line tool that you could use instead of the "rails" command, and used Appsta and a standard template to do some common things, namely setup staging and production Heroku environments, push the code to GitHub, setup some common gems, and use jQuery instead of Prototype/Scriptaculous. However, I realised over time that although that was a great default script for me, the whole point of Rails templates and advanced customization means that it probably wasn't as useful for everyone else, as we all have slightly different preferences.
I decided therefore to do away with the command line "appsta" command and default template, so that Appsta is concentrated on simply being a library of useful setup helper methods for throwing into your own custom Rails templates.
It makes sense for developers to have their own customized Rails template with their own personal preferences for Rails application configuration (or perhaps per-company templates) - however it doesn't make much sense for us all to have mammoth scripts that duplicates basic functionality within the template itself. The idea with Appsta is that over time we can accrue quite a large library of a variety of methods, and then building a customized template is just a case of picking and choosing the bits you want.
So Appsta 1.1.0 does just that, and tonight as well as tidying it up to remove the command line app, I also added in a shortcut for doing a git push, and helpers for removing some default and often unnecessary default files (README, public/index.html, public/favicon.ico), and also for removing the default JS libraries and using jQuery instead. An example template using all of the current available helper methods is on the wiki for the project on GitHub, but in short...
To install Appsta:
sudo gem install appsta
And to load Appsta in your Rails template, add in:
# Load Appsta require "appsta" Appsta.load
To remove default files:
# Remove the default README, public/index.html, and public/favicon.ico remove_default_files
To setup jQuery:
# Remove the default JS libs and use jQuery use_jquery("1.3.2")
And to push to Git remote(s):
# This performs a push of master to the specified remote(s) git_push(:origin, :staging)
That covers the new bits, you can check out the Heroku and GitHub integration and the existing helper methods on the wiki page. I'm hoping that with the command line and default template clutter out of the way, Appsta can now be focused on reusable, useful chunks of helper code for your Rails templates. If you want to discuss this further with me, or have any comments or questions, please let me know. And if you want to contribute, don't hesitate to fork the code, make your changes and send me a pull request!