I always forget about the ‘svn copy’ command, and Josh Susser has reminded me of its awesome usefulness. In this case, its usefulness as a way to start projects.

I took his advice a step further. Rolling on the idea of an ‘Image’ of a basic Rails project with its own repository, on top of setting the svn:ignore properties for log/ and tmp/ I also installed a couple things I use in almost every project:

1. acts_as_authenticated
2. ar_fixtures
3. Capistrano rake and deploy tasks

I also generated an authenticated controller/model and added an initial user to my migration, so I’m all set to login. Before importing my ‘basicauth’ Rails image to subversion, I created my svn best practices directories (branches/ tags/ trunk/) and put the rails code into trunk.

After importing, I’m all set to start as many rails projects as I want. Why not use bash scripting to make it even easier.

#!/bin/bash
echo 'Creating new rails app'
cd ~/Sites/
echo 'Creating repository'
svn copy svn+ssh://myuser@myrepos.com/svn/rails/basicauth svn+ssh:/myuser@myrepos.com/svn/rails/$1
echo 'Checking out code'
svn co svn+ssh://myuser@myrepos.com/svn/rails/$1/trunk $1
cd $1
mate .

If I save this, chmod +x it, and copy it to /usr/local/bin/ – Now all I have to do to start a new rails app is:

myrails anewapp

It will copy the repository, checkout the code, and even open it in TextMate.

Posted January 15th, 2007 in Productivity, Rails, Software/Scripts
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