In a previous post, I provided scripts that made the creation of a new Edge Rails project easy. Since then, Rails has moved from Subversion to Git, which means that the scripts I provided no longer work as expected. Fortunately, very little has changed and I was able to make the script a little bit better so that it acts like the original rails command.

Prerequisites

First, you’re going to need git. I could have written the script to grab the latest version via a zipfile, but I wanted something that was fast and worked on all platforms. Windows can unzip files, but then I’d have to make Windows users go grab commandline tools to unzip files.

Installing Git

Mac users with XCode and Macports installed can do it with

sudo port install git-core +svn

Windows users can install Msysgit.

Linux users should install Git using their package manager or from source.
Here’s the script. Instructions for running it are after the code.

#!/bin/ruby
git_repo = "git://github.com/rails/rails.git"
 
help = %Q{
Rails Info:
    -v, --version                    Show the Rails version number and quit.
    -h, --help                       Show this help message and quit.

General Options:
    -p, --pretend                    Run but do not make any changes.
        --force                      Overwrite files that already exist.
    -s, --skip                       Skip files that already exist.
    -q, --quiet                      Suppress normal output.
    -t, --backtrace                  Debugging: show backtrace on errors.

Description:
    The 'edge_rails' command creates a new Rails application with a default
    directory structure and configuration at the path you specify, using the
    very latest version of Rails.

Example:
    edge_rails ~/Code/Ruby/weblog

    This generates a skeletal Rails installation in ~/Code/Ruby/weblog.
    See the README in the newly created application to get going.    


}
 
require 'fileutils'

if ARGV.empty?
  puts help
  exit
end

dir = ARGV.shift
args = ARGV.join (" ")


FileUtils::mkdir(dir)
FileUtils::mkdir("#{dir}/vendor")
 
puts "Exporting EdgeRails from #{git_repo}"
# system "svn export http://svn.rubyonrails.org/rails/trunk #{dir}/vendor/rails"
system "git clone --depth=1 #{git_repo} #{dir}/vendor/rails"
system "rm -rf #{dir}/vendor/rails/.git*"

system "ruby #{dir}/vendor/rails/railties/bin/rails #{dir} #{args}"

How this works for Mac and Linux users

Save the script to your home folder as edge_rails, and set the execute bit:

  chmod 644 ~/edge_rails

Run it with

  ~/edge_rails your_app

You could symlink it to your /usr/local/bin if you are feeling clever.

How this works for the Windows crowd

Save this script as c:\ruby\bin\edge_rails.bat

@echo off
goto endofruby
#!/bin/ruby
git_repo = "git://github.com/rails/rails.git"
 
help = %Q{
Rails Info:
    -v, --version                    Show the Rails version number and quit.
    -h, --help                       Show this help message and quit.

General Options:
    -p, --pretend                    Run but do not make any changes.
        --force                      Overwrite files that already exist.
    -s, --skip                       Skip files that already exist.
    -q, --quiet                      Suppress normal output.
    -t, --backtrace                  Debugging: show backtrace on errors.

Description:
    The 'edge_rails' command creates a new Rails application with a default
    directory structure and configuration at the path you specify, using the
    very latest version of Rails.

Example:
    edge_rails ~/Code/Ruby/weblog

    This generates a skeletal Rails installation in ~/Code/Ruby/weblog.
    See the README in the newly created application to get going.    


}
 
require 'fileutils'

if ARGV.empty?
  puts help
  exit
end

dir = ARGV.shift
args = ARGV.join (" ")


FileUtils::mkdir(dir)
FileUtils::mkdir("#{dir}/vendor")
 
puts "Exporting EdgeRails from #{git_repo}"
# system "svn export http://svn.rubyonrails.org/rails/trunk #{dir}/vendor/rails"
system "git clone --depth=1 #{git_repo} #{dir}/vendor/rails"
system "rm -rf #{dir}/vendor/rails/.git*"

system "ruby #{dir}/vendor/rails/railties/bin/rails #{dir} #{args}"
__END__
:endofruby
"%~d0%~p0ruby" -x "%~f0" %*

Now, open a new command prompt and type

edge_rails my_new_app

If it doesn’t work, check that you have Git installed properly and have added Git’s command line utilities to your path.