I’ve made several improvements to Rails Composer:

an option to disable Rails Turbolinks

installation of the Bundler gem as needed

fix errors with Haml and Slim

add rails-stripe-membership-saas example application

Thank you to the people who support the project with a subscription ($19/month), who get access to the RailsApps tutorials as a reward. If you don’t subscribe, please consider supporting the project so I can keep it going for everyone’s benefit.

Turbolinks were introduced in Rails 4.0 to improve the apparent speed of Rails applications. Great idea but Turbolinks complicate any application that relies on JavaScript. After one too many headaches caused by Turbolinks, I’ve added an option to Rails Composer to disable Turbolinks. I suspect I will not be the only developer who chooses to disable Turbolinks, at least in the early stages of development.

I recently installed Ruby 2.2.2 using RVM and was dismayed to find that Rails Composer stopped working because it couldn’t find the Bundler gem. Well, it wasn’t Ruby 2.2.2 that broke Rails Composer. I updated RVM before installing Ruby 2.2.2. RVM previously installed Bundler automatically. As of version 1.26.11 (released March 31, 2015), RVM no longer installs Bundler automatically. Rails Composer needs to find Bundler or it fails. So now Rails Composer will install Bundler before trying to use it. Personally, I think it is unfortunate that RVM no longer installs Bundler automatically. I’m not the only one who thinks so. In any case, Rails Composer no longer relies on a previous installation of Bundler.

Of course, I don’t always get things right, either. Long ago I added the option to use Haml or Slim with Rails Composer. I only use ERB myself, and for too long, the Haml or Slim options have not worked very well. Thanks to Matthew Orahood (pyrabbit), the Haml and Slim options are working much better now. I rely on contributors to report and fix issues with Haml and Slim, so please let me know if there is more to do.

It is getting more difficult to keep the project going, because I’m building more complex applications, that take longer to build and document. Many people who subscribe to the tutorials would like to see new tutorials delivered more often, so I’ve lost quite a few subscribers in the last two months. I’ve delivered a new starter application and tutorial this month, showing how to set up an application for recurring billing using Stripe and the Payola. It is the rails-stripe-membership-saas application and you can generate the complete application using Rails Composer. If you want me to continue building starter applications like this, please subscribe to support the project, and you’ll get a dozen in-depth tutorials, including the rails-stripe-membership-saas tutorial.