I recently started a new project with Ruby on Rails called Hava Amina. It’s still in development, the code is on Github here.

While running rails new I realized that I actually wanted to change certain things.

First of all, I recently started learning TDD with Everyday Rails Testing with Rspec and I’m loving the readability and organization of the specs that they show. So I wanted to use rspec in my app instead of the default minitest.

Also, I wanted to use postgresql for my database instead of the default sqlite3 because I normally deploy with heroku which is easy, free, and fast. Heroku does not support sqlite3 databases, so it’s always a hassle to go into the config files and change it yourself and make sure you’re getting everything right.

So I did a little poking around and I found in a blog post that there is a command line argument I can pass to rails new in order to use pg as a database and another one to remove the default test framework.

Here is the one line command:

rails new app-name -T -d postgresql

The -T will skip the testing framework altogether, and the -d postgresql will set postgres as the db.

Now, in order to use rspec, all I need to do is add gem 'rspec-rails' to the Gemfile in the test and development group and bundle install. (Thanks Nicholas Hunt for the correction)

Then, to generate the folders and files and helpers for the project, run:

rails generate rspec:install

(Thanks Edward Woodcock for the correction)

This will add the spec folder along with the rails_helper and spec_helper and also.rspec file in the main directory.

I normally add --format documentation when running rspec in order to see a description of the test as it’s running instead of just a dot. If I want this option every time I run rspec, I can add it to the .rspec file that was generated.

Now my app is perfect, but I know that I want this configuration for the next time I want to set up a new rails app and the time after that and so on. Is there a way that I can just run this setup every time?

I discovered through some nice blog posts that there is a file called .railsrc that does something similar to what the .rspec file does above. It passes in whatever command line arguments you define in it every time you call rails new. You can edit it by calling atom ~/.railsrc (or whatever editor you prefer) from any directory in your command line.

At the end of the day my .railsrc file looked like this:

~/.railsrc

-T
-d postgresql

There are other ways of customizing more fully using rails templates (in blog post linked above), but ultimately I decided I can do that later, because I’m lazy.

Now, every time I run rails new, I get postgres and no minitest. 🔥🔥🔥

Now for some words from my 7 month old son:

:
''
...........]];;;                        CBBEA
'

Thanks Mo!