primo

It is interesting to see this approach. Seems a lot of interest this week in exploring approaches to Rails starter apps: Cristiano Betta's Primo [1], Carbon Five's Raygun [2], this script from TaskRabbit. So I updated two lists I maintain: A list of starter apps: http://railsapps.github.com/rails-examples-tutorials.html A list of various template-generating gems and application templates: http://railsapps.github.com/rails-application-templates.html Two observations, if I may. First, it's very interesting to compare the commonalities and differences among the various starter apps, in light of discussion of "Rails is omakase" (@dhh) and "Rails has Two Default Stacks" (@steveklabnik). Second, most starter apps end up mired in the tar pits of neglect, abandoned in the constant change of Rails and its gem ecosystem. Building a starter app, an

Rails application templates are awesome, especially for hackers that often need to set up the same basic app, but also for companies that want to promote their best practices. Sadly the ecosystem around them seems to be quite limited. Primo is a new gem that tries to solve this by adding a command line interface for defining your default template and share it with others. At the moment Primo allows you to run a Rails install with a template based on PostgreSQL/HAML/Rspec. It also allows you to specify your own default template in a .primo file. Inspired by Steve Klabnik's article "Rails has Two Default Stacks" and the awesome Rails application templates.