Ruby-on-Rails

With the current virus issues I forgot to publicize that my presentation about creating pleasant development environments was posted along with an example of Dockerizing an existing Rails application. You can find the slides for the talk here. Finally you can find a ready to use existing Rails template that uses Docker here.

Thanks to YEGRB for allowing me to present and to Will for his awesome editing skills. Also thank you to Corgibytes for feedback on draft presentation.

I appreciate people posting getting started examples and templates online. They are good for getting started and playing with a new technology. The problem is the templates are usually not production ready. They are also missing a bunch of the developer tools and best practices, such as linters and automated builds, that every project will eventually need.

So I created a Rails 6 template that includes many of the tools I want on a Rails project. I wanted the template to be easy to use but also contain all the tools I wanted. This includes a Docker container, a linter, a type checker, and a build scripts. Actually the template has two build scripts, one for GitHub Actions and one for GitLab CI. The Docker script will build both development and production images.

A working example can be found here in the Saturday MP Examples GitHub.

First thing you need to do is create a basic Rails app as outlined in my previous post.  My setup is the same as creating Rails app: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS host using Docker to containerize my development environment.

Once your basic Rails app is up and running you can add React.  This example uses React-Rails.  First, you need to update the Docker file to install Node JS and Yarn.  Open up the DockerFile and change it so it looks like the below.

Back in the day Rails apps didn’t add foreign keys to database tables.  Believe it or not this was a feature not a bug.  The idea was that you shouldn’t “repeat” the relationship between you models in the code and in the database.  It wasn’t until Rails 4.2 that support was added for foreign keys.  

As you can probably guess I think this was a mistake.  If you have worked with a database without any foreign key constraints you quickly run into data integrity issues.  I don’t care how careful you think you are you will eventually screw up.  If not you then another person or application will corrupt your data.  Line items not attached to an order, address without customers, cats and dogs living together, etc.

I was curious to see if I could create a Docker container for a new Rails project without having Ruby or Rails installed on the host machine.  To do this I created a new Ubuntu 18 virtual machine with the bare minimum installed for the OS.  I also install Docker, RubyMine, and DataGrip.

Initially I was hoping I could just create the new project inside RubyMine.  Unfortunately I couldn’t get it working.  As you will see setting up the initial Docker container requires more then just running the “docker-compose up” command.