Don't generate trash with rails generators

Andrei Kaleshka

02 Jul 2013

Let’s assume that we have rails >= 3 application. When you generate controller a lot of trash is appeared in your application. I mean here these things: helpers, assets (css and js), view tests. In 99% cases these files are waste and never used, so it’s reasonable to disable generating their. It’s very easy.

Configure your application

Go to config/application.rb and paste there these lines:

config.generators do |g|
  g.assets = false
  g.helper = false
  g.view_specs = false
end

These magic lines of code will get rid of headache and you will forget about removing these trash manually forever!

Also I recommend to don’t pass action names in rails controller generator because it inserts automatically routes which always are changed later.

Say we have runned command rails g controller users new edit it will generate the following trash.

Example of generated routes:

get "users/new"
get "users/edit"

It also generates tests which are never remained in this look. For my opinion it’s more useful to have pending tests than tests which do nothing.

Example of generated tests for controller:

require 'spec_helper'

describe LessonsController do

  describe "GET 'new'" do
    it "returns http success" do
      get 'new'
      response.should be_success
    end
  end

  describe "GET 'edit'" do
    it "returns http success" do
      get 'edit'
      response.should be_success
    end
  end

end

Thank you for your attention!