Well built rails code for download

Question

Hi, I want to get into rails by examining well built code where can i find typical open source rails project that i can download and learn from ? i'm interested in facebook connect integration (facebooker), tag clouds, searching in my website

I'm not looking not tutorials or screen casts

Thanks!

Answer 1

Gady, this is an extremely rich topic you're asking about and resources are all over the internet. Try starting at http://rubyonrails.org/.

You should be able to find tens of questions just like yours (asked and answered) by searching SO at the top bar.

Answer 2

Ryan Bates has an excellent series of videos.

http://railscasts.com/

An extremely valuable resource.

Radiant is a CMS that you can download for free and see how it works. It is a great piece of code to look at and see how it works.

Answer 3

For Rails, part of it is the building process, so one feasible approach is to read a tutorial like http://railstutorial.org/book

then when in Chapter 2, you will use Scaffold, and at that time, you will have some basic code to look into how a basic Rails app is.

I also suggest you use source control like Git, Mercurial, or SVN to commit different phases of the project, from creating the rails project and then after each step, so you can diff what the changes are during each step.

If you already have Ruby 1.9.2, Rails 3.0.1, and sqlite3, then you can

rails new myproj
cd myproj
rails generate scaffold foo name:string salary:integer gpa:float note:text
rake db:migrate
rails server

and now you can use http://localhost:3000/foos to create, display, update, delete the foo records, and have quite a bit of source code to look at. Most of the customizable code is in app, with css and javascript in the public folder.

Answer 4

Have a browse of ruby tool box and download some open source. For example there's refinery and zena, two content management systems and Rboard, a forum. Depends what you want really but there's plenty out there. Ruby toolbox entries are ordered by github watchers and forks to give you an idea of their popularity.

Answer 5

And don't forget the official:

guides.rubyonrails.org

well there is one "bigger" project on github, waiting for downloading and contribution... but it's a little controversial because of the security issued they have (had?)

It's still worth a look:

http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora

Answer 6

I really like looking at the commits in teambox.
I find it a bit more complicated. But there's also spree.

There's also devise which is really interesting to look at too.

Finally, I'd recommend you to follow the rails commits (it's the only commits feed I have in my Google Reader).

Answer 7

• This question gives a good list
• a list of projects with good test-suites
• a list of open source rails apps to learn from

Answer 8

I guess that most open source Rails projects are shared on Github, so it may be interesting to browse its Ruby section and look for most watched or most forked projects:

http://github.com/languages/Ruby

Steady stream of new interesting projects to take a look at :)