Whales is a bash script which creates a Dockerized Rails application, without requiring you to install Rails, Ruby, Node, Yarn, database drivers etc. The only requirement is Docker.
This project was inspired by Docked Rails CLI and relies on dockerfile-rails.
Where the Docked Rails CLI allows people to get up-and-running with Rails development quickly, it is by design not very customisable (i.e. you can only use the Rails defaults). On the other hand, the goal of dockerfile-rails is to be able to generate Dockerfiles for any Rails project.
Whales brings these two ideas together. With Whales, you can get set up with a relatively custom Dockerized Rails application, in just a few commands, without needing to install anything other than Docker.
Whales allows you to create a new Rails application with all of the options of the rails new command, and Dockerizes it for easy development and deployment.
- Download the script:
curl -so whales https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cdwsn/whales/main/whales && chmod +x whales && alias whales=./whales
- Generate a new application:
whales new weblog -d=postgresql -j=esbuild
cd weblog
- Create the database, generate a scaffold, run a migration:
whales rails db:create
whales rails g scaffold post title:string body:text
whales rails db:migrate
- Start the container(s):
whales up
(Note: if you'd like the whales command to always be available in your terminal, instead of ./whales, you'll have to add the alias to your terminal profile)
whales new: Generate a new Dockerized Rails app
whales compose: Run any docker compose command in the development environment
whales up: Start the containers for the development environment (using the bin/dev script if using css or js bundling)
whales down: Stop the development containers
whales build: Build the development containers as specified by the docker-compose file
whales bash: Start a shell session in the web / Rails service (requires the container to be running, which can be done with whales up)
whales run: Execute a single docker compose run command against a service, and remove the container when finished
whales recompose: Regenerate the development docker-compose file (to be used after regenerating the Dockerfile using rails generate dockerfile --compose)
whales rails: Execute a single rails command against the web / Rails service, and remove the container when finished
whales bundle: Executes a single bundle command against the web / Rails service, and remove the container when finished
whales rspec: Executes the equivalent of a bundle exec rspec command (requires you to install the rspec-rails gem and run whales rails g rspec:install first)