Are Rails Brick or Rails Composer widely used?

Question

I'm new to Ruby on Rails and have been seeing people use auto boilerplate generators like Rails Brick or Rails Composer to create boilerplate user-management systems, etc. Coming from a background that doesn't trust auto-generated code, is it good/legitimate practice in Rails to use such systems. Also, I'm working on a project with a startup. Is it fine to use such generators and how widespread a habit is this.

P.S. Mods please note that this is not a question asking comparisons/opinions/disputes. I'm curious about the general practice in Rails and how often is this used in production.

Answer 1

I'm the maintainer of Rails Composer so I believe I can answer this question with authority.

I respect (and share) the urge to build from scratch. That's a healthy impulse. Rails includes a facility for application templates (Rails Composer is an application template) because automation saves time and effort. For people who build many web apps, a time comes when you decide to automate the process.

Rails Composer offers an advantage over roll-your-own application templates because it is open source, used by thousands of developers with code contributions by many. As Rails and gems change, Rails Composer gets updated so you get a current "reference implementation" every time. It gives you well-tested starter apps that integrate all the bits and pieces that require tweaking, like RSpec plus Capybara and FactoryGirl, flash messages and navigation with either Bootstrap or Foundation front-end frameworks, Devise or OmniAuth for authentication, Pundit for authorization, and many utility gems that developers like to add (Guard, Pry, etc.). It lets you choose your stack (for example, ERB, Haml, or Slim), offering choices to the extent that the community has contributed options.

If you're concerned about the safety of running an install script, the code is open source and used by thousands of Rails developers (you can see over 2000 watchers on the GitHub repo). It's purely an application template using the Thor library, and though in theory someone could contribute code that tampered with your files, we'd never accept a pull request like that. Rails Composer only offers well-known popular gems, so you are not exposed to potential risk of using unknown gems.

Rails Composer is widely used, particularly by consultants who build lots of apps. Many of the prominent consulting firms have an in-house application template (Thoughbot Suspenders, for example) and some use Rails Composer or the rails_apps_composer gem that generates custom application templates. Developers who work on on only one application regularly (maintaining a big project, for example) tend to be less familiar with application templates like Rails Composer, but it is popular with developers who start a lot of apps.

Stack Overflow is not a place for opinions, so if you want a range of opinions or debate about the merits of Rails application templates, Reddit or Quora might be a better place to ask.

Welcome to Stack Overflow! I hope all your questions will be answered accurately and timely.

Answer 2

I'm the developer of Prelang which is similar to the generators you mentioned. It differs by adding data modeling, GitHub integration, and deeper configuration for some features. Like Daniel, I believe I too have some authority on this and agree with his very complete answer.

To answer your question, Prelang is newer but it's already used by thousands of developers ranging from beginners to dev shops.

I'd like to note that Prelang (and the other builders) are different than what you traditionally think of when you hear "code generation". When working on Prelang, my goal is to automate "everything that a Rails developer would have done anyways". Prelang does generate methods/code but mostly it's automating install processes of Gems, setting configuration values, creating models, and running rails commands. That said, Prelang is opinionated in terms of which gems it uses but I've selected the most popular gems for each feature and will give the flexibility to choose between multiple routes once I get a little more traction.

Prelang also makes real Git commits so you can look through every commit after your project generates giving you full visibility into your codebase. This is intended to further ease concerns relating to generated code.

Erik

Answer 3

Most gems are so easy to set up nowadays, that I think you won't need such a generator. After all it's just a question of taste – I like using the command line, and I like knowing exactly what's in my codebase. From my personal experience, I have never seen someone use such a thing in professional Rails development, but clearly there are people out there who use them.

The one case I can think of where these generators make sense is when you're bootstrapping projects very frequently. In this case however, I find the existing generators not to be flexible enough. Thoughtbot for example has built their own app generator called Suspenders, which of course includes a very opinionated set of gems etc. but it gives them exactly what they need.

As a side note regarding your security concerns: for me, the dependency trees that are spanned up when you use many gems are a far worse security threat. For example in a medium sized Rails project it is not uncommon to depend on 100+ Gems; no-one can read all of them. You'll have to trust all of those as well.