3. A few essential concepts
○ A Ruby Gem is a container for reusable
Ruby code.
○ A Rails Gem is a Ruby Gem that depends
on Rails.
○ To "gemify" something, is to create a Gem
out of a piece of isolated Ruby code.
5. Quick intro to Railties & Engines
○ Since version 3, Rails major components
are built on top of a core class called
Railtie.
○ Thus, all (new and old) components based
on this class were dubbed "Railties".
○ This class "provides several hooks to
extend Rails and/or modify the
initialization process".1
[1] Taken from http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/Rails/Railtie.html
6. Quick intro to Railties & Engines
○ Railties are responsible for their own
initialization/configuration process, making
Rails core's independent from them -sort
of a "plug & play" standard.
○ Obviously, we can create our own Railties
and extend our application, much like any
Rails Gem we know does.
7. Quick intro to Railties & Engines
○ Read more about Railties:
○ Rails::Railtie - Ruby On Rails API Online
http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/Rails/Railtie.html
8. Quick intro to Railties & Engines
○ An Engine is a Railtie.
○ Hence, an Engine can do all that that a
Railtie can do, and more.
○ Internally, Engine inherits from Railtie, as
you imagined.
9. Quick intro to Railties & Engines
○ Engines are self-contained Rails
applications.
○ Any Rails ~> 3 application is an Engine.
○ Engines you plug into your application
integrate seamlessly adding their
controllers, models, views, routes, etc. as if
they were part of the whole thing.
○ They can also be isolated (namespaced) to
avoid conflicts with the main application.
11. Deeper into Engines
○ Engines are the way to extend any Rails 3
application by default.
○ They can be thought of as Plugins (sort of).
○ In fact, the Rails default generator for
Engines is: rails plugin new <name> --
<type>.
○ Type can be full or mountable.
12. Deeper into Engines
○ Mountable Engines
○ Namespace isolated by default.
○ Meaning: no name-clash conflicts with the "host"
application.
○ All your controllers, models and routes get
isolated inside the namespace.
○ The routes namespace name is defined when
mounting the Engine routes in the routes.rb file.
○ This is a conservative approach.
13. Deeper into Engines
○ Full Engines
○ No namespace isolation; everything you put in it
will become available to the host application "as
is".
○ Useful if you're adding functionality to existing
resources.
○ Because routes are also not isolated, you should
take special care when defining them.
○ Could blow up everything if you use common
names for classes. Watch out!
14. Deeper into Engines
○ Read more about Engines:
○ Rails::Engine - Ruby On Rails API Online
http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/Rails/Engine.html
○ Try yourself building an Engine - Ruby on Rails
Guides
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/engines.html
16. Gemify your Engine
○ Check you have correctly defined your .
gemspec file.
○ Run gem build <name>.gemspec.
○ Then install it with gem install .
/<name>.gem.
○ You can add it to Bundler's Gemfile
passing a :path key in your options hash.
○ And, well, that's pretty much everything I
wanted to cover here.
