Using new Rails defaults

After a short time with Rails, I’m beginning to find that my tastes in testing frameworks and databases don’t exactly match “The Rails Way”. While in my beginning studies, I don’t plan to make a habit of breaking from tradition without having a good reason why, some specifics have come up that I change on a regular basis in rails new commands that I was sure would be easily modifiable in some way. Luckily, the Rails 3.2 Release Notes offer some tasty information on what may be the best option:

Default options to rails new can be set in ~/.railsrc. You can specify extra command-line arguments to be used every time rails new runs in the .railsrc configuration file in your home directory.

Nice. So implementing a .railsrc file should work great.

-T # Don't use Test::Unit
--database=postgresql # Use postgresql

We’ll see that creating a new Rails app will implement these rather nicely:

$ rails new app
Using -T # Don't use Test::Unit --database=postgresql
# Use postgresql from /Users/kristian/.railsrc

Obviously there’s a wealth of possibilities here — any command-line option available to Rails is configurable in the .railsrc. Try rails -h to get the full wealth of options.