published: 25th of April 2019
One of my 2019 goals was to migrate codingpackets.com from the python web framework Django to the ruby web framework Rails . Well it's done and this is the story of how and why I did it.
Rails is a really nice to work with web framework which is "Optimizing for programmer happiness with Convention over Configuration" This means it's very opinionated about how you need to do things. For example you need to name your files a certain way and organise your folders in a specific layout. This might be a bit of an irk for some, but for me I found it nice to be able to focus on the content rather that spending a lot of time working on boilerplate.
In a lot of ways Django and Rails are pretty similar in that they are both successful open source projects with plenty of community support. They are both opinionated MVC frameworks that come with a ton of batteries included. I originally launched codingpackets.com two years ago using Django 1.9, Django has continued to move along nicely as a project and I was very happy with it but I wanted to explore other alternatives. Essentially codingpackets.com is a static site, I do not run any database so there are a lot of options out there. I toyed with Flask and considered Hugo but in the end, I landed on Rails minus ActiveRecord which is the database ORM.
In my $JOB I work with a couple of Ruby based projects and although I am not any sort of gun Rubyist I have really come to like the language and want to use it more. Someone much smarter than me once said:
The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.
- Dennis Ritchie
Thinking back to when I was learning Python, this is the same reason I started using Django. At the time, I was using PHP as the front end component of a project when I found out about Django. If a Python based framework could free me from the shackles of PHP it was worth a shot. I also figured writing more python could not hurt and I did not regret my choice. Django has served me well over the last 6 or 7 years.
Besides Rails 5, I am only using a couple of other projects but they do a lot of work. I also used these same projects with the previous Django site, albeit different versions.
Bootstrap (version 4.3 at the time of writing). It is a NIGHTMARE to try and build a site without a CSS framework like bootstrap. There are so many considerations around browser vendors/versions and desktop/tablet/mobile sites. For those out there that do this for a living, I salute you. Bootstrap gives you a nice out of the box experience but it is also pretty painless to customize.
Font Awesome (version 5.8 at the time of writing) provides really nice icons. There is a free and a pro version, I am just using the free icons of which there are a lot to choose from. The icons at the page footer are from Font Awesome.
highlight.js (version 9.15 at the time of writing) provides the syntax highlighting for the code blocks on the site. This is a really awesome project, it supports highlighting for 185 languages in 89 styles. I am currently using the xt256 style.
I originally built codingpackets.com as a place to keep my notes instead of using Evernote when I became unhappy with that product. In the beginning I did not have a blog, it was just a collection of my notes and dead links that I had not yet (and still not) populated. I took the opportunity to clean up all the dead links and half completed articles which has made the site look a lot cleaner and pleasant to navigate.
I am hosting the site on a Digital Ocean droplet. Since moving to Rails I have actually been able to halve the size of the droplet I use and it now only costs me $5 a month instead of $10. I like to use a Droplet instead of an App stack as it gives me the freedom to pick and choose the versions of code I use. I also like the droplet based firewall that DO has which prevents a lot of the junk traffic hitting the VM and eating up resources (Another reason I was able to reduce the VM size).
I used a couple of resources to learn Rails and I found them very helpful so I would like to give them a shout out.
This is a nice introductory course. It is said that "Rails if full of magic". It has a lot of helper generators to build out boiler plate for you. This is one of the reason it is really fast to get things done with Rails. This course makes a point of not using the magic but showing you how the magic works behind the curtain.
https://www.udemy.com/pro-ruby-on-rails-rails5/
I would say this course is not for Rails beginners. But! It is a great follow on course. It really digs into how things work in rails in a very practical way. As you go through the course building out a project the topics build on one another and the rabbit hole just goes down and down and down. I have another project in mind that will require full app stack and I will definitely be coming back to this course to review some of the topics.
https://www.udemy.com/pro-ruby-on-rails-rails5/
Of course there was a lot of trawling through StackOverflow questions and answers as well as reading over the Rails docs (which are very good) and various fantastic blog posts. I will write about some of the more specific hurdles I faced in dedicated blog posts in the future.
Ruby on rails is awesome, working with it is actually enjoyable. The community is vibrant and there is an abundant ecosystem of battle tested well supported libraries. With the rise of Javascript based frameworks such as Angular, React and Vue, MVC frameworks such as Rails and Django are currently on the decline. That does not mean they are going the way of the dinosaur. Im guessing as web socket support becomes more wide spread MVC frameworks will rise in popularity again.