Pre-packaged Rails applications

Question

Seems like most Rails applications have similar 'base' functionality. As such, it seems that there would be value in having pre-build Rails applications at various functionality points such as:

1. basic User model with authentication using Authlogic
2. #1 + openid integration
3. #2 + authorization using declarative_authorization
4. #3 + Administration module
5. #4 + a Profile model
6. Themes (useful stylesheets and such)
7. Friendship model
8. Geocoding
9. ...

In addition to the basic MVC stuff, these applications would include:

• testing harnesses
• seed data
• git support

One could choose start from any of these functionality points.

Other than the sample application that are available with the various gems/plugins, are there projects such as these? If not, I would certainly be willing to contribute what I have.

Answer 1

There are a few of these knocking about. Mike G's BigOldRailsTemplate (http://github.com/ffmike/BigOldRailsTemplate) is unapologetically fat, but has a lot of stuff that is commonly used ready and working together. This is probably your best starting point.

One of the original attempts at this was Bort (http://github.com/fudgestudios/bort), which hasn't had much love recently. There's also FBRP which boasts feature coverage of commonly-unfeatured areas (http://github.com/diabolo/fbrp).

I'll defer to others' opinions on this, but it seems to me that the passing fashions of plugins, gems and versions of rails means these projects are often difficult to maintain. And, of course, generally speaking much more time is spent maintaining existing apps than creating new ones!

Answer 2

When I first started with Rails, I asked the same question. I was looking for something like Pinax but for Rails. After starting with Rails, and working through a few example tutorials/projects, I realized that it's so incredibly easy to add exactly what you need...so why bother messing with what someone else thought was the perfect combination when you can create what you think is a perfect combination.

When I was working with CodeIgniter, I made my own pre-packaged starting point. I'm sure that most Rails developers (and really any developers) have their own pre-packaged starting points.

All in all, I think that you would be better off creating your own pre-packaged application. That way, you get to choose exactly what you want in terms of plugins and such.