I was curious about using rails and git, specifically with regard to engines.
Engines as Gems
As gems, they work really well - and I'm surprised the one I've been working on doesn't even end up in vendor/plugins (yet anyway - it may when I change from using "../beast" as the :path parameter).
Rought Sketch of a Rails 3 Engine Gem
Here's how it works:
- I added my engine gem named beast to the Gemfile in a rails 3.1 app
- Running bundle install did not copy the file into vendor/plugins as I'd expected
- Running "bundle exec generate" results with my new beast generators
- Running "bundle exec generate" beast creates a new migration as well as
Access to the Primary Application Helpers
When I first setup a view from an engine, connected by a routed mount, like this:
mount Beast::Engine => '/beast'
My partials stopped working, then I found out about main_app.
main_app.accounts_path
What is Beast?
Beast is not a new name at all. Its the mysterious rails forums engine that has been around for ages and has gone through a million transformations - beast, savage beast, altered beast, etc.
I think its best to return to just beast. I thought, maybe roast beast. Who knows?
Even More Rails 3 Engine Considerations
- It is surprisingly elegant - engines as gems work really well, and generators act as a
bridge to "pull in" stuff from the engine into the main app, so the main app and the engine can be isolated or integrated with a real specificity.
- The only hurdle I faced was how much has changed with engines so recently
sort of, the current state is that there is so much flexibility its a little too abstract.
- I think the Rails 3.1 engine code base is solid.
- What needs to happen is some documentation to help direct strategies - similar to choosing between STI and polymorphism.
- The generator I employed will modify main app views, but also create db migrations in db/migrate.
- The plugin doesn't even have to go in vendor/plugins since its a required gem, you actually don't even need to install it - in this case, say I have dev/main_app and dev/my_engine; in dev/main_app/Gemfile I put:
gem => 'my_engine', :path => '../my_engine'
- I'm so glad its that easy! bundler even says something like "no need to cache my_engine gem"!
References