We have a very basic Rails stack called Prologue that we start with for a lot of projects. The Rails 2.3.8 version of Prologue was
simply kept in a repo and whenever we needed to start a new project we would clone it and go from there. Pretty basic stuff. Recently
I have been making a new version of Prologue on Rails 3 and I decided to take the approach of writing it as an application template instead.

The main advantages we've seen so far with this are:

• Ability to mix and match templates
• Dynamically setup basic variables on the fly
• Dependencies stay up-to-date
• Huge time savings in getting a project started

Writing templates for Rails 3 is extremely easy. Here's some examples you will find useful.

yes?


if yes?('Do you need sphinx? (yes/no)')

do stuff to setup sphinx

end

remove_file


remove_file 'this_file_is_gonna_die.rb'


create_file


create_file 'new_file.txt' do <<-'FILE'
really sweet stuff all up in my text file
FILE
end


append_file


append_file 'db/seeds.rb' do <<-'FILE'
User.create! :name => 'Quick Left'
FILE
end


gsub_file


gsub_file 'config/application.rb', /:password/, ':password, :password_confirmation'

gsub_file 'config/environments/production.rb', /config.i18n.fallbacks = true/ do <<-'RUBY'
config.i18n.fallbacks = true
config.action_mailer.default_url_options = { :host => 'yourhost.com' }
### ActionMailer Config
# Setup for production - deliveries, no errors raised
config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :smtp
config.action_mailer.perform_deliveries = true
config.action_mailer.raise_delivery_errors = false
config.action_mailer.default :charset => "utf-8"
RUBY
end

inject_into_file


inject_into_file 'config/application.rb', :after => "# Configure the default encoding used in templates for Ruby 1.9.\n" do <<-'RUBY'
config.generators do |g|
g.template_engine :haml
end
RUBY
end


apply


apply File.expand_path("../templates/sphinx.rb", FILE)


get


get "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js", "public/javascripts/jquery.js"
get "http://github.com/rails/jquery-ujs/raw/master/src/rails.js", "public/javascripts/rails.js"
get "http://html5shiv.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js", "public/javascripts/shiv.js"


run


run 'bundle install'
run 'any command here'


generate


generate(:migration, "AddNameToUsers name:string")


inside


inside "public/javascripts" do
remove_file 'controls.js'
remove_file 'dragdrop.js'
remove_file 'effects.js'
remove_file 'prototype.js'
end


say


say "templates are pretty dope"


gem


gem "rspec"
gem "rspec-rails", ">= 2.0.0.beta.19", :group => [:test, :development]
gem "cucumber", :git => "git://github.com/aslakhellesoy/cucumber.git", :group => [:test, :development]


git


git :init
git :add => '.'
git :commit => "-m 'Initial commit'"


Those examples should really get you going. Once you're ready to try out the application template simply run:


rails new my_app -m path/to/template.rb


Beyond that just keep in mind you can use any methods provided by Thor::Actions and Rails::Generators::Actions. How sweet is that!