Ariejan.net

BaseApp: a quick start for your Rails App

For the impatient: http://github.com/ariejan/baseapp

Got issues? Feature requests or patches? http://baseapp.lighthouseapp.com/

Every Rails developer has at least once developed an application that needed user authentication and some basic UI features like tabs and a sidebar. Ask yourself now: “how often have you installed and extended the restful_authentication plugin?”.

Yes, I have done it quite a few times and everytime I find myself writing the same code over and over again. User login, password reset, ‘forgot password’ functionality. I’ve build the same basic UI over and over again. Added administrator users and roles.

Are you tired of doing the same old things over and over again? I was! So, I created BaseApp.

BaseApp is a Ruby on Rails application which contains a lot of code you want in your project by default. To give you an idea of what is does out of the box:

• User Authentication including password recovery, account activation and account suspensio.
• Admin interface where the admin user can easily manage users and tweak app settings
• Default CSS-based UI with tabs and a sidebar. Very acceptable by default and easy to customise.

BaseApp is currently based on Rails 2.1.1. And although it’s a pretty complete package and ready to be used for your next project, it still needs a bit of work. Check out the README for features that should be in BaseApp.

Of course, BaseApp is open source so fork a copy at the GitHub and send me those patches (of pull requests)!

There are tons of feaures that can be included into BaseApp, so the next big thing is to include some sort of configuration that allows you to disable/enable certain BaseApp features.

So, go right ahead! Use it! Fork it! Send me those pull requests!