Description
Suspenders is the base Rails application used at thoughtbot.
Suspenders alternatives and similar gems
Based on the "Rails Application Generators" category.
Alternatively, view Suspenders alternatives based on common mentions on social networks and blogs.
-
Bootstrappers
Bootstrappers is the base Rails application using Bootstrap template and other goodies. -
Raygun
Rails application generator that builds applications with the common customization stuff already done. -
boring_generators
Boring generators aims to make your development faster by delegating boring setups to us. -
Ultra Light Wizard
No time to manage a wizard state machine, session variables, or complicated controllers? Use ultra light wizard!! A RESTful session-less validation-friendly simple multi-step form approach in Rails.
CodeRabbit: AI Code Reviews for Developers

* Code Quality Rankings and insights are calculated and provided by Lumnify.
They vary from L1 to L5 with "L5" being the highest.
Do you think we are missing an alternative of Suspenders or a related project?
README
Suspenders
Suspenders is the base Rails application used at thoughtbot.
Installation
First install the suspenders gem:
gem install suspenders
Then run:
suspenders projectname
This will create a Rails app in projectname
using the latest version of Rails.
Associated services
- Enable Circle CI Continuous Integration
- Enable GitHub auto deploys to Heroku staging and review apps.
Gemfile
To see the latest and greatest gems, look at Suspenders' [Gemfile](templates/Gemfile.erb), which will be appended to the default generated projectname/Gemfile.
It includes application gems like:
- Autoprefixer Rails for CSS vendor prefixes
- Bourbon for Sass mixins
- Bitters for scaffold application styles
- Sidekiq for background processing
- High Voltage for static pages
- Honeybadger for exception notification
- Normalize for resetting browser styles
- Oj
- Postgres for access to the Postgres database
- Rack Canonical Host to ensure all requests are served from the same domain
- Rack Timeout to abort requests that are taking too long
- Recipient Interceptor to avoid accidentally sending emails to real people from staging
- Simple Form for form markup and style
- Skylight for monitoring performance
- Title for storing titles in translations
And development gems like:
- Dotenv for loading environment variables
- Pry Rails for interactively exploring objects
- ByeBug for interactively debugging behavior
- Bullet for help to kill N+1 queries and unused eager loading
- Bundler Audit for scanning the Gemfile for insecure dependencies based on published CVEs
- Web Console for better debugging via in-browser IRB consoles.
And testing gems like:
- Capybara and Google Chromedriver integration testing
- capybara_accessibility_audit and capybara_accessible_selectors
- Factory Bot for test data
- Formulaic for integration testing HTML forms
- RSpec for unit testing
- RSpec Mocks for stubbing and spying
- Shoulda Matchers for common RSpec matchers
- Timecop for testing time
Other goodies
Suspenders also comes with:
- The
./bin/setup
convention for new developer setup - The
./bin/deploy
convention for deploying to Heroku - Rails' flashes set up and in application layout
- A few nice time formats set up for localization
Rack::Deflater
to compress responses with Gzip- A low database connection pool limit
- Safe binstubs
- t() and l() in specs without prefixing with I18n
- An automatically-created
SECRET_KEY_BASE
environment variable in all environments - Configuration for CircleCI Continuous Integration (tests)
- Configuration for Hound Continuous Integration (style)
- Configuration for stylelint
- The analytics adapter Segment (and therefore config for Google Analytics, Intercom, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, etc.)
Heroku
Read the documentation on deploying to Heroku
You can optionally create Heroku staging and production apps:
suspenders app --heroku true
This:
- Creates a staging and production Heroku app
- Sets them as
staging
andproduction
Git remotes - Configures staging with
HONEYBADGER_ENV
environment variable set tostaging
- Creates a Heroku Pipeline for review apps
- Schedules automated backups for 10AM UTC for both
staging
andproduction
You can optionally specify alternate Heroku flags:
suspenders app \
--heroku true \
--heroku-flags "--region eu --addons sendgrid,ssl"
See all possible Heroku flags:
heroku help create
Git
This will initialize a new git repository for your Rails app. You can
bypass this with the --skip-git
option:
suspenders app --skip-git true
GitHub
You can optionally create a GitHub repository for the suspended Rails app. It requires that you have Hub on your system:
brew install hub # macOS, for other systems see https://github.com/github/hub#installation
suspenders app --github organization/project
This has the same effect as running:
hub create organization/project
Dependencies
Suspenders requires the latest version of Ruby.
Some gems included in Suspenders have native extensions. You should have GCC installed on your machine before generating an app with Suspenders.
Use OS X GCC Installer for Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6).
Use Command Line Tools for Xcode for Lion (OS X 10.7) or Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8).
We use Google Chromedriver for full-stack JavaScript integration testing. It requires Google Chrome or Chromium.
PostgreSQL needs to be installed and running for the db:create
rake task.
Redis needs to be installed and running for Sidekiq
Issues
If you have problems, please create a GitHub Issue.
Contributing
See [CONTRIBUTING.md](CONTRIBUTING.md).
Thank you, contributors!
License
Suspenders is Copyright © 2008-2017 thoughtbot. It is free software, and may be redistributed under the terms specified in the [LICENSE] file.
About thoughtbot
Suspenders is maintained and funded by thoughtbot, inc. The names and logos for thoughtbot are trademarks of thoughtbot, inc.
We love open source software! See our other projects. We are available for hire.
*Note that all licence references and agreements mentioned in the Suspenders README section above
are relevant to that project's source code only.