I got fed up with having to start a Ruby project from scratch every other day. Thus I proudly present my Ruby BDD project boilerplate.

Requirements

This is an “opinionated” boilerplate. I say that because having an opinion seems to be de rigueur. What I really want to say is: I picked a setup which works for me and it might or might not work for you.

My development tools of choice include the RSpec testing library with guard as a modern replacement for the autotest gem. Without automatted test execution doing TDD or BDD makes no sense. To speed up test execution by magnitudes, I plug-in Spork as a test suite pre-loader. With guard and Spork, getting feedback fast is guaranteed.¹

I use MRI Ruby v2.0 via rvm and usually create a project-specific gemset when I know the project is going to be a fully-fledged gem or an application I eventually intend to ship. I really dig recent Ruby version manager’s feature to automatically switch between rubies and gemsets via the use of .ruby-version and .ruby-gemset files in the project root. This feature made using project gemsets bearable in the first place. I recommend you look into that stuff, too, but it’s not necessary for this boilerplate code to be useful. You can convert old .rvmrc-based projects with:

rvm rvmrc to .ruby-version

For Rails applications, you might also want to have a look at:

• Zeus preloads the Rails environment so that Rails-specific tasks take seconds only
• Commands sidesteps loading the whole Rails environment

Ok. Now go and check out my Ruby RSpec-Guard-Spork boilerplate on GitHub right now.