Overview

This is a starter template for building a Sinatra web application.

Use this as a starting point for your Sinatra applications.

Included Components

Tech Stack

• Sinatra
• HAML
• Sequel
• RSpec
• Capybara
• Webkit
• Bootstrap
• jQuery

Features / Modules

The application includes some basic items to get an application started. These include:

• A user account model
• A login page
• Logging to an application log file
• Flash messaging

Default security infrastructure

The application also uses some application settings that are prudent to have running. These include:

• Having rack-protection running to safeguard against CSRF, XSS, etc.
• Using bcrypt for password hashing
• Encrypted session cookies
• Support for marking routes as anonymous vs. authenticated

Testing

The starter template includes both RSpec and Cucumber test examples. The tests are run with code coverage monitored (with reports placed into the results/ directory).

Database infrastructure

The starter template uses different database types for different environments:

Environment	Database Type
development	SQLite database
test	In-memory SQLite database
production	MySQL database

Swapping out MySQL for another database type can be done by configuring a different adapter for Sequel.

Directory Layout

Folder	Description
db/migrations	The Sequel migrations to alter the database schema
models	The data models
public	The static resources for the application
public/css/app.css	Application-specific styling
public/js/app.js	Application-specific JavaScript
routes	The route handlers for requests
tasks	Additional Rake tasks
test/spec	The RSpec specification tests
test/feature	The Cucumber feature tests
view_models	View models for the application
views	The HAML views
config.ru	Rack configuration
app.rb	The main application definition

System setup

Setup Ruby

Install Ruby using RVM.

• Install RVM

• Install and configure Ruby

    rvm install 2.2.0
    rvm use 2.2.0
  

• (Optionally) Configure a gemset

    echo YOUR_PROJECT_NAME > .ruby-gemset
    echo 2.2.0 > .ruby-version
  

Install the depencies

Some of the Ruby gems have build dependencies that need to be before the gems can be installed.

On a Debian/Ubuntu system, you can install these by running:

    sudo apt-get install build-essential libmysqlclient-dev libxslt-dev libxml2-dev build-essential libqtwebkit-dev

Install the gems

    bundle install

Setup environment variables

Environment variables are loaded in from a .env file. See the env.example file for example configuration.

The SESSION_SECRET key is used to encrypt the browser session. To generate a session secret key for your application:

    require 'securerandom'
    SecureRandom.hex(40)

The DATABASE_URL configures the URL for the database. This URL also indicates to Sequel which database adapter to use. Examples include:

Database	Example Url
SQLite	sqlite://db/development.db
MySQL	mysql2://<USER>:<PASSWORD>@<HOST>/<DATABASE>

Tasks

Configure the database

    rake db:migrate

Load seed data (to have data available for development)

    rake db:seed

Run the application

    rake start

Run the tests

    rake db:test:all

For a full list of tasks available

    rake -T