EmberCLI Rails

EmberCLI Rails is an integration story between (surprise suprise) EmberCLI and Rails 3.1 and up. It is designed to provide an easy way to organize your Rails backed EmberCLI application with a specific focus on upgradeability. Rails and Ember [slash EmberCLI] are maintained by different teams with different goals. As such, we believe that it is important to ensure smooth upgrading of both aspects of your application.

A large contingent of Ember developers use Rails. And Rails is awesome. With the upcoming changes to Ember 2.0 and the Ember community's desire to unify around EmberCLI it is now more important than ever to ensure that Rails and EmberCLI can coexist and development still be fun!

To this end we have created a minimum set of features (which we will outline below) to allow you keep your Rails workflow while minimizing the risk of upgrade pain with your Ember build tools.

For example, end-to-end tests with frameworks like Cucumber should just work. You should still be able leverage the asset pipeline, and all the conveniences that Rails offers. And you should get all the new goodies like ES6 modules and EmberCLI addons too! Without further ado, let's get in there!

Installation

Firstly, you'll have to include the gem in your Gemfile and bundle install

gem "ember-cli-rails"

Then you'll want to configure your installation by adding an ember.rb initializer. There is a generator to guide you, run:

rails generate ember-cli:init

This will generate an initializer that looks like the following:

EmberCLI.configure do |c|
  c.app :frontend
end

options

• app - this represents the name of the EmberCLI application.

• path - the path, where your EmberCLI applications is located. The default value is the name of your app in the Rails root.

EmberCLI.configure do |c|
  c.app :adminpanel # path is "<your-rails-root>/adminpanel"
  c.app :frontend, path: "/path/to/your/ember-cli-app/on/disk"
end

Once you've updated your initializer to taste, you need to install the ember-cli-rails-addon.

For each of your EmberCLI applications install the addon with:

npm install --save-dev [email protected]

And that's it!

Multiple EmberCLI apps

In the initializer you may specify multiple EmberCLI apps, each of which can be referenced with the view helper independently. You'd accomplish this like so:

EmberCLI.configure do |c|
  c.app :frontend
  c.app :admin_panel, path: "/somewhere/else"
end

Usage

You render your EmberCLI app by including the corresponding JS/CSS tags in whichever Rails view you'd like the Ember app to appear.

For example, if you had the following Rails app

# /config/routes.rb
Rails.application.routes.draw do
  root 'application#index'
end

# /app/controllers/application_controller.rb
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  def index
    render :index
  end
end

and if you had created an Ember app :frontend in your initializer, then you could render your app at the / route with the following view:

<!-- /app/views/application/index.html.erb -->
<%= include_ember_script_tags :frontend %>
<%= include_ember_stylesheet_tags :frontend %>

Your Ember application will now be served at the / route.

CSRF Tokens

Your Rails controllers, by default, are expecting a valid authenticity token to be submitted with non-GET requests. Without it you'll receive a 422 Unprocessable Entity error, specifically: ActionController::InvalidAuthenticityToken.

In order to add that token to your requests, you need to add into your template:

<!-- /app/views/application/index.html.erb -->
# ... your ember script and stylesheet includes ...
<%= csrf_meta_tags %>

This will add the tokens to your page.

You can then override the application DS.RESTAdapter (or whatever flavor of adapter you're using) to send that token with the requests:

// path/to/your/ember-cli-app/app/adapters/application.js
import DS from 'ember-data';
import $ from 'jquery';

export default DS.RESTAdapter.extend({
  headers: {
    "X-CSRF-Token": $('meta[name="csrf-token"]').attr('content')
  }
});

Ember Test Suite

To run an Ember app's tests in a browser, mount the EmberCLI::Engine:

# config/routes.rb

Rails.application.routes.draw do
  mount EmberCLI::Engine => "ember-tests" if Rails.env.development?

  root "application#index"
end

Ember tests are served based on the route you mount the Engine on (in this example, /ember-tests) and the name of the Ember app.

For example, to view tests of the frontend app, visit http://localhost:3000/ember-tests/frontend.

Enabling LiveReload

In order to get LiveReload up and running with EmberCLI Rails, you can install guard and guard-livereload gems, run guard init and then add the following to your Guardfile.

guard "livereload" do
  # ...
  watch %r{your-appname/app/\w+/.+\.(js|hbs|html|css|<other-extensions>)}
  # ...
end

This tells Guard to watch your EmberCLI app for any changes to the JavaScript, Handlebars, HTML, or CSS files within app path. Take note that other extensions can be added to the line (such as coffee for CoffeeScript) to watch them for changes as well.

NOTE: EmberCLI creates symlinks in your-appname/tmp directory, which cannot be handled properly by Guard. This might lead to performance issues on some platforms (most notably on OSX), as well as warnings being printed by latest versions of Guard. As a work-around, one might use directories option, explicitly specifying directories to watch, e.g. adding the following to the Guardfile.

# also add directories that need to be watched by other guard plugins
directories %w[app config lib spec your-appname/app]

Heroku

In order to deploy EmberCLI Rails app to Heroku:

First, enable Heroku Multi Buildpack by running the following command:

heroku config:add BUILDPACK_URL=https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-multi

Next, specify which buildpacks to use by creating a .buildpacks file in the project root containing:

https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-nodejs
https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-ruby

Add rails_12factor gem to your production group in Gemfile, then run bundle install:

gem "rails_12factor", group: :production

Add a package.json file containing {} to the root of your Rails project. This is to make sure it'll be detected by the NodeJS buildpack.

Make sure you have bower as a npm dependency of your ember-cli app.

Add a postinstall task to your EmberCLI app's package.json. This will ensure that during the deployment process, Heroku will install all dependencies found in both node_modules and bower_components.

{
  # ...
  "scripts": {
    # ...
    "postinstall": "node_modules/bower/bin/bower install"¬
  }
}

ember-cli-rails adds your ember apps' build process to the rails asset compilation process.

Now you should be ready to deploy.

Additional Information

When running in the development environment, EmberCLI Rails runs ember build with the --output-path and --watch flags on. The --watch flag tells EmberCLI to watch for file system events and rebuild when an EmberCLI file is changed. The --output-path flag specifies where the distribution files will be put. EmberCLI Rails does some fancy stuff to get it into your asset path without polluting your git history. Note that for this to work, you must have config.consider_all_requests_local = true set in config/environments/development.rb, otherwise the middleware responsible for building EmberCLI will not be enabled.

Alternatively, if you want to override the default behavior in any given Rails environment, you can manually set the config.use_ember_middleware and config.use_ember_live_recompilation flags in the environment-specific config file.

Ember Dependencies

Ember has several dependencies. Some of these dependencies might already be present in your asset list. For example jQuery is bundled in jquery-rails gem. If you have the jQuery assets included on your page you may want to exclude them from the Ember distribution. You can do so by setting the exclude_ember_deps option like so:

EmberCLI.configure do |c|
  c.app :frontend, exclude_ember_deps: "jquery"
  c.app :admin_panel, exclude_ember_deps: ["jquery", "handlebars"]
end

jQuery and Handlebars are the main use cases for this flag.

Contributing

1. Fork it (https://github.com/rwz/ember-cli-rails/fork)
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request