Rails Web App Quickstart

This is a Rails Web App Quickstart for Nullstone. This is based off the official Rails getting started guide.

This quickstart is set up with:

• Ruby 3.1
• Rails 6.1
• Static Assets
  • Configured to hot-reload assets for local development
  • Precompiled and served through NGINX for docker builds
• Postgresql Database
  • Migrations are executed on start of docker image
• Error logs
  • Emitted to stdout for docker builds
  • Pretty errors for local development
• Hot reload for local development

How to launch via Nullstone

1. Create postgresql datastore.
2. Create a public web app. (Remember app-name for later)
3. Add the postgresql datastore (from step 1) to the app.
4. Add the SECRET_KEY_BASE for Rails Cookies capability to the app.
5. Add the Nginx Sidecar for Fargate Service capability to the app.
6. Provision

nullstone up --wait --block=<app-name> --env=<env-name>

7. Build, push, and deploy

docker build -t rails-quickstart .
nullstone launch --source=rails-quickstart --app=<app-name> --env=<env-name>

Running locally

You can run this project locally inside Docker or using rails alone. To use Docker, this project contains docker-compose.yml that runs with RAILS_ENV=development. This ensures that using Docker doesn't prohibit handy development features:

• Assets are compiled on demand.
• Pretty error logs are displayed in the browser.
• Hot reload is configured so that changes to rails files doesn't require a docker rebuild or restart.

To run using Docker locally, use docker compose:

docker compose up

Then, visit http://localhost:3000.

Hot reload

The app in docker-compose.yml is configured to automatically reload changes to files. You do not need to rebuild/restart the app when making changes to code.

Update dependencies

To make changes to dependencies, make changes to Gemfile and restart your docker container. bundle install happens automatically at the boot of the docker container to update dependencies.

docker compose restart app

Details on quickstart

This web app was generated following these steps.

1. rails . new --database=postgresql --skip-test --webpack
2. Add the following to Gemfile

group :test do
  gem 'rspec-rails'
end

3. bundle install
4. rails generate rspec:install
5. Set logs to stdout in development mode.

# config/environments/development.rb
...
# Use default logging formatter so that PID and timestamp are not suppressed.
config.log_formatter = ::Logger::Formatter.new

if ENV["RAILS_LOG_TO_STDOUT"].present?
  logger           = ActiveSupport::Logger.new(STDOUT)
  logger.formatter = config.log_formatter
  config.logger     = ActiveSupport::TaggedLogging.new(logger)
end

5. Swap out the default database config in config/database.yml

default: &default
adapter: <%= ENV.fetch("DB_ADAPTER") { "postgresql" } %>
encoding: unicode
# For details on connection pooling, see Rails configuration guide
# https://guides.rubyonrails.org/configuring.html#database-pooling
pool: <%= ENV.fetch("RAILS_MAX_THREADS") { 5 } %>
url: <%= ENV['DATABASE_URL'] %>

6. Comment out production database settings in config/database.yml

production:
<<: *default
#  database: rails6_webapp_quickstart_production
#  username: rails6_webapp_quickstart
#  password: <%= ENV['RAILS6_WEBAPP_QUICKSTART_DATABASE_PASSWORD'] %>

7. rails g controller Articles index
8. Add the following to config/routes.rb

root 'articles#index'