Suspenders as a gem

Suspenders—as a reminder, Suspenders is our base Rails project that can be easily upgraded—has some issues. Specifically, two: you have to pull down all of the git repo in order to start a project, which itself requires pulling down all of the git repo again, and; Suspenders itself is untested.

The solution to these problems are fairly straight-forward so I went ahead and did it. Presenting, today, the Suspenders gem!

gem install suspenders

Installing the gem will give you the suspenders command. I have grandiose plans for this command-line utility but for now you can create a new project:

suspenders create carbon_dating

You can upgrade a Suspenders-based project at any time, as usual:

rake git:pull:suspenders

As a reminder Suspenders will give you:

• clearance
• cucumber
• factory_girl
• fakeweb
• formtastic
• hoptoad_notifier
• jferris-mocha (test spies)
• paperclip
• shoulda
• timecop
• webrat
• will_paginate
• high_voltage
• limerick_rake
• backtrace silencers
• HTTP and SMTP exceptions
• test/mocks
• noisy attr_accessible
• lib/extentions
• date and time formats

To run the new Suspenders test suite you will need the git repo for the gem:

git clone git@github.com:thoughtbot/suspenders-gem.git

Then go in and run rake. This will build a new project using Suspenders, set up the last touches (clearance stuff, mostly), and make sure that the project passes.