An excerpt from http://www.sitepoint.com/rails-application-templates-real-world/, by Glenn Goodrich
I’m about to start a new project that will have many Rails (and rails-api) based services, and I want a way to make sure all the services are created equal. There are a couple of other developers on the project, so I don’t want us each creating wildly different application structures or using different gems unless there’s a good reason.
For example, I’d like us all to start with the same version of Rails and PostgreSQL is the repository of choice, so installing the SQLite gem is silly. In the test and development environments, it’d be great to already have Rspec and Guard ready to go when the application is generated. Also, having Pry available from the get-go is just plain smart. It’s a myriad of these and similar changes that have me wanting to modify our starting point.
There are tons of ways to do this, but I didn’t really want to start with something like RailsBricks or Rails Composer. I have nothing against either of those, quite the opposite. I actually wrote about RailsBricks and I think Daniel Kehoe (the creator of the RailsApps tutorials and Rails Composer) should be knighted. Simply put, I want to do this without adding another dependency, if possible.
The Rails core team offers an approach in Rails Application Templates, so why not take a shot at using what the core team uses.
Spoiler: It works great.
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