Yeah, it's "production ready" in the sense that the starterkit project was pulled from a couple of production apps and properly configured with a nice selection of gems.

Most starter kit apps help get developers up and running in a development environment but leave a big gap between dev and production. Sometimes this is good, but a lot of web apps are very similar.

I got tired of rewriting authentication systems, configuring gems, and repeating the same tasks for each project. Even if you use Devise and similar gems, you still have to do a lot of work to create a good UX and integrate OAuth. And then you have to dig through each gem's documentation to make sure it's configured properly for a production environment.

The rails4-starterkit is basically my dumping ground for tips, tricks, and production tuning settings for Rails 4.1. You'll still need to make adjustments for your own app, but it's a much better starting point for cranking out weekend or freelance projects.

I'm also open sourcing my node starter kits, but they're much earlier on in development and better node projects already exist.

I never heard of it before, and the url is timing out for me now (I was gonna say HN effect, but that's a github.com, uh oh. Anyway).

I thought the Rails 'starter kit' was `rails new my_app_name`

Interesting, I looked through it, and his other repos, and he seems to be a really solid rails guy. Looks like a promising kit, especially considering how much of a pita setting up CanCan with Rails 4 can be.

Thanks ch4s3. I released the starter kit after bashing my head in on a few configuration tasks with various gems. I haven't looked far and wide, but I think it's one of the more complete Rails 4 starter apps. I needed it for my own projects, but hopefully it can save some other devs configuration time.

If you know of other solid starter app projects, I'm happy to fork them and make them discoverable in https://github.com/starterkits. It's meant to be a community project. I just haven't had any time to promote it.

Neat. The problem with templates in general they lose an ability to hack on and recreate them because they depend on code generation and manual tweaks that have already been done (and lost). As such, I'm refactoring https://github.com/steakknife/rails41rc_plus_hacks_and_threa... into generators that will add the right things to a bare Rails app. So if you need omniauth + devise + cancan but not X, it's a `rails g` away. Rails has an amazing app generator DSL built-in.

I totally agree. Generators are the way to go. I just haven't had time to make them for starterkit.

Open an issue or pull request when you get your generators working, and I'll happily link to your project. Always good to give people options.

Hi. This looks great. I'm new to rails and this looks like it will be fun to mess around with tomorrow and learn what the commons gems etc are. Seriously - Thanks very much for making this. Anything I should know as a noob or shall I just dive in and have a play around?

You should be able to just dive in. Rails is pretty friendly that way. The starterkit app is just a basic Rails 4.1 app with all the gems. So anything you find in Rails 4.1 tutorials should work just fine.

If you run into any issues, just open an issue on the project and I'll do what I can to help.

I'll let you know if I find anything cool, I'm following you on github now.

Check out https://github.com/CanCanCommunity/cancancan, the continuation of the cancan gem.

Oh nice. I'll switch over to CanCanCan.