Process on new Rails apps

Thought I’d quickly share a comment I posted on /r/rails in the post “What are the first steps you take when starting a new project?”:

First things first – new tmux instance! Crucial. Then…

Thorough README, including project goals and if it’s a full Rails app, models/controller relationships.

For the technical side – establish some things up front. HAML v. ERB, SASS v. LESS; JS assets manually or via Bower, etc. Testing and development workflow up-front for less work later: Rspec and sometimes Cucumber, Guard with guard-rspec, guard-bundler. Then echo 3000 >> ~/.pow/<appname> to serve it on a .dev domain, while still being able to run rails server. Finally, pry-rails and pry-byebug to be able to drop a binding.pry and intelligently debug.

I’ve been using a process similar to this for the last couple months as I’ve been starting up some new projects. Most notably is the addition at the end of pry-byebug, a really killer debugger tool for Ruby 2.0+ projects. Check out the README - it has some really great step debugging tools similar to Chrome Debugging Tools.