An example Rails 7 app

This app is built with Rails 7, Ruby 3, Vite, Vue 3 and typescript. You could use this example app as a base for your upcoming projects. Or, you could use it as a tutorial that tells you which steps you need to take to create a project from scratch.

Several gems and packages are included in this example app that I've been using for a long time. It wires up a number of things you might use in a real world Rails app. However, at the same time it's not loaded up with a million personal opinions.

• As Webpacker has been retired, we are using Vite instead. It wouldn't be fair if I didn't say that: Vite is fantastic.

Tech stack

Initially, I used the rails new baseapp -c tailwindcss -d postgresql command to initialize the project using the importmaps and default configurations, but I have since removed the importmaps, tailwindcss, and all default configurations in favor of using Vite. You can see a list of gems that are in the project with a link to their commit. Therefore, you can easily find what we configured for each gem.

Note there is a commit/branch for each gem/package and adding/changing a code in the repo, and you can see the list of the steps we did in order at the below. e.g. step 1 in the repo was init project and using PostgreSQL. step number 2 was adding RSpec, etc.

Back-end

• 1- PostgreSQL (init project)
• 2- RSpec (commit1) (commit2)
• 3- Factory Bot Rails (commit)
• 4- Faker (commit)
• 5- Database Cleaner (commit)
• 6- SimpleCov (commit)
• 7. Rubocop(Check the Healthy app/Backend part)
• 8- Annotate (commit)
• 9- Pry (commit)
• 10- Pagy (commit1) (commit2)
• 11- HasScope (commit)
• 12- JSON:API serializer A fast JSON:API serializer for Ruby Objects (commit)
  • jsonapi.rb which provides some features for jsonapi-serializer PR, commit and PR2
  • jsonapi-rspec which provides some beautiful RSpec matchers for JSON API PR
• 13- Action Cable (commit)
• 14- Redis (commit, PR)
• 15- Sidekiq (commit, PR)
• 16- dotenv (commit)

Front-end

• 17- Vite Removing importmaps and all frontend libraries and Use Vite instead (PR), and remove Sprockets and unused assets files (PR)
• 18- Code quality and format (Check Healthy app/Frontend part)
• 19- Vue.js Vue.js version 3 (PR , PR-fixbug)
• 27- Enabling auth process(and make the app ready) which needed more packages PR:
  • axios
  • pinia The official state management library for Vue. will be used instead of Vuex
  • vue-query
  • @babel/types
  • We start using TypeScript and Vue3 compistion API here

Healthy app

Frontend

• 18- Code quality and format (PR1, PR2)
  • ESlint
  • Eslint plugin vue
  • Prettier
  • Husky
  • lint-staged

Backend

• 7- RuboCop Code quality and format. First I added rubocop-rails_config gem by these two commits (commit1) (commit2), but after a while, I removed this gem and added rubocop gem and its extensions separately in this PR

• 20- Brakeman Checking Ruby on Rails applications for security vulnerabilities. you can check config/brakeman.ignore to see ignore errors (PR)

• 21- bundler-audit Patch-level verification for bundler (PR)

• 22- Fasterer Make Rubies code faster by suggestion some speed improvements. check .fasterer.yml to enable/disable suggestions (PR)

• 23- License Finder Check the licenses of the gems and packages. you can update doc/dependency_decisions.yml to manage licenses (PR)

• Moving linting gems into development and test group in Gemfile (commit)

Common

• 24- overcommit to manage and configure Git hooks by managing all healthy app tools. you can check .overcommit.yml to enable or disable tools. (PR)
• 25- Enabling github action to run overcommit after push and pull requests in github. Check .github/workflows/lint.yml to see the github configs (PR)

Auth

• 26- Devise and Devise::JWT JWT authentication solution Backend PR1, Backend PR2

We are using JWT to authentication using Devise and Devise::JWT gems. If you send a request to log in, the successful response will give you a header called Authorization which has the JWT token as value. and you need to add this header and its value to all of your requests.

Predefined auth routes:

/signup

Request:

curl -XPOST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{ "user": { "email": "test@example.com", "password": "12345678", "password_confirmation": "12345678" } }' http://localhost:3000/signup

Response: Returns the details of the created user

{"data":{"id":"4","type":"user","attributes":{"email":"test@example.com","sign_in_count":1,"created_at":"2022-04-18T17:49:06.798Z"}}}

/login

Request:

curl -XPOST -i -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{ "user": { "email": "test@example.com", "password": "12345678" } }' http://localhost:3000/login

Response: includes Authorization in header and details of the loggedin user

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
X-XSS-Protection: 0
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-Download-Options: noopen
....
Content-Type: application/vnd.api+json; charset=utf-8
Authorization: Bearer eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiI0Iiwic2NwIjoidXNlciIsImF1ZCI6bnVsbCwiaWF0IjoxNjUwMzA0MjU3LCJleHAiOjE2NTAzOTA2NTcsImp0aSI6IjM4ZmI4ZGIyLWVlMjgtNDg2Yy05YjE5LTA2NWVmYmQ0ZGE4MCJ9.p8766vPrhiGpPyV2FdShw1ljBx2Os3D1oE_rPjjAYrY
...

{"data":{"id":"4","type":"user","attributes":{"email":"test@example.com","sign_in_count":2,"created_at":"2022-04-18T17:49:06.798Z"}}}

/logout

Request: includes Authorization and its JWT token in the header of DELETE request

curl -XDELETE -H "Authorization: Bearer eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiI0Iiwic2NwIjoidXNlciIsImF1ZCI6bnVsbCwiaWF0IjoxNjUwMzA0MjU3LCJleHAiOjE2NTAzOTA2NTcsImp0aSI6IjM4ZmI4ZGIyLWVlMjgtNDg2Yy05YjE5LTA2NWVmYmQ0ZGE4MCJ9.p8766vPrhiGpPyV2FdShw1ljBx2Os3D1oE_rPjjAYrY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" http://localhost:3000/logout

Response: nothing

Note We are using JWT to authentication, it means you can use this Rails base app as a vanilla rails app (Backend and frontend together), or as a Rails API app. both you can use.

Apps

I always prefer to have two apps for my projects, one for the part that will be shown public (I called it Website), and the second one for the part that you are managing there (I called it Panel), simplify you need to log in to have access there.

If you can check the codes you can see that there are two layout view files and two actions in application_controller, and two routes in routes.rb file. and for frontend there are two different entrypoints and routers ane etc.

In this case, you can use different technologies and UI Component Libraries in frontend, e.g. use Vuetify for Website and use VueTailwind for Panel. or even (it's a bit headache) but you can use React for Website and use Vue.js for Panel.

Two simple html/css templates have been added for Website and Panel. you can remove them easily

Running this app

You need to do few small steps to run the app

Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/zakariaf/rails-base-app baseapp
cd baseapp

Copy example file

cp .env.example .env.local

Environment variables defined here(.env), feel free to change or add variables as needed. This file is ignored from git (Check .gitignore) so it will never be commit.

If you use different values for environment variables in other envs, e.g. test, you need to copy one more: .env.test.local

Note .env.test is used by github workflows.

Setup the project

create databases

rails db:setup

start the project

• rails server

  rails s

• frontend app

  yarn dev

Renaming the project

This app is named baseapp and the module is named BaseApp. But for sure you would like to have a different name.

The only thing you need to do is just running the bin/rename-project yourappname YouAppName script. as you see this script needs 2 arguments:

• First argument: The lower case version of your app's name, such as myapp or my_app depending on your preference.
• First argument: Used for your app's module name. such as MyApp

bin/rename-project myapp MyApp

This script is going to:

• Perform a number of find / replace actions
• Initialize a new git repo for you (Optionally)

After that, If you're happy with your new project's name you can delete this script.

Or you can keep it around in case you decide to change your project's name later on.

I got the rename script idea and codes from Docker Rails Example project with some small changes.

TODO

• Add cypress
• Dockerize
• automatic deploy process using capistrano
• add .gitlab-ci