After almost 4 years as CTO at The Fool, is time for me to search for new adventures. Starting from May 1st 2016 I’ll join the Curcuma team. Below, a picture from new office:

Just joking 😛 Will be a big challenge for me because I’ll move from specific field, web and social network analysis, to general purpose development where projects are really varied: custom CMS, integration with IoT devices, mobile application and many others. In the end, a good challenge!

eCommerce solutions are quite popular in Curcuma’s portfolio and my last experience about was in 2008 with an early version of Magento. I worked on similar products but I’m quite “rusty” on this topic. Starting from the Ruby ecosystem, default in Curcuma, only two realistic options are available: Spree (acquired by First Data and no longer supported) and Solidus (a Spree fork quite young but already interesting).

I searched for tutorials about Solidus but version 1.0.0 was shipped last August (and is based on Spree 2.4) and community is still young. I found only beginner’s tutorials so I decided to follow Github README instructions on master branch.

Install

Start with a fresh installation of Rails 4.2 (Rails 5.0 beta seems not supported yet), add gems and run bundle install

gem 'solidus'
gem 'solidus_auth_devise'

Inspecting Gemfile.lock you can find solidus dependencies:

solidus (1.2.2)
solidus_api (= 1.2.2)
solidus_backend (= 1.2.2)
solidus_core (= 1.2.2)
solidus_frontend (= 1.2.2)
solidus_sample (= 1.2.2)
solidus_auth_devise (1.3.0)

The solidus package seems a container for these modules. I really like this approach: is clean, encourages isolation and mask complexity. Also gemspec is the cleanest I’ve seen yet.

# encoding: UTF-8
require_relative 'core/lib/spree/core/version.rb'
Gem::Specification.new do |s|
s.platform    = Gem::Platform::RUBY
s.name        = 'solidus'
s.version     = Spree.solidus_version
s.summary     = 'Full-stack e-commerce framework for Ruby on Rails.'
s.description = 'Solidus is an open source e-commerce framework for Ruby on Rails.'
s.files        = Dir['README.md', 'lib/**/*']
s.require_path = 'lib'
s.requirements << 'none' s.required_ruby_version = '>= 2.1.0'
s.required_rubygems_version = '>= 1.8.23'
s.author       = 'Solidus Team'
s.email        = 'contact@solidus.io'
s.homepage     = 'http://solidus.io'
s.license      = 'BSD-3'
s.add_dependency 'solidus_core', s.version
s.add_dependency 'solidus_api', s.version
s.add_dependency 'solidus_backend', s.version
s.add_dependency 'solidus_frontend', s.version
s.add_dependency 'solidus_sample', s.version
end

Setup and config

Anyway next step on README is to run following rake tasks

bundle exec rails g spree:install
bundle exec rake railties:install:migrations

First one gives me a warning:

[WARNING] You are not setting Devise.secret_key within your application!
You must set this in config/initializers/devise.rb. Here's an example:
Devise.secret_key = "7eaa914b11299876c503eca74af..."

fires some actions related to assets, migrations and seeds then ask me for username and password. Standard install.

About the warning I found another post that recommend to run this task.

rails g solidus:auth:install

Is not clear to me what it does but seems working. After run warning is left.

Rake about migration (bundle exec rake railties:install:migrations) gives no output. I suppose migrations are already installed after first step. No idea.

Anyway last step liste on README is to run migrations (bundle exec rake db:migrate) and give no output too so everything seems ok.

No we can fire rails s and enjoy our brand new store 😀

A bit more control

These steps are cool but do a lot of things we probably don’t want like install demo products and demo users. Following the README, installation can be run without any automatic step:

rails g spree:install --migrate=false --sample=false --seed=false

and then you are free to run any of the available step with your customizations

bundle exec rake railties:install:migrations
bundle exec rake db:migrate
bundle exec rake db:seed
bundle exec rake spree_sample:load

Now our new store is ready. It’s time to dig deeper into Solidus structure. See ya in another post bro 😉