JavaScript & Rails: a `webpacker` evaluation

Webpacker is still opt-in for new Rails projects. But this might change. The JavaScript ecosystem is moving fast and new JavaScript frameworks are pushing customer’s expectations to higher levels. To use these frameworks with your Rails app, you had a few options:

• Include the JavaScript manually; which requires you to manually copy the files in place
• Use a gem-wrapper to to install the JavaScript library; but this required quite some maintenance on the Gem-author’s side.
• Try to mangle npm or yarn into the asset pipeline yourself
• Use Rails Assets (an automagic Gem-wrapper)

A small praise for Rails Assets

I have been using rails-assets.org the past few years to keep my JavaScript dependencies up to date. It thought it was smart solution; instead of requiring individual developers to maintain Gem-wrappers, Gem wrappers are created on the fly by RailsAssets.org. It was smart and light weight on the developers side and worked perfectly with the Rails' Asset p…

Unit-testing your front-end code in a Rails project: Yarn, Tape & Rails

I like Rails, but one thing that Rails falls short in is Javascript dependency management.

While Rails Assets, a proxy that allows for listing Bower packages in your Gemfile makes managing front-end libraries good enough for most front-end work, RailsAssets itself is mainly addressing asset management; it doesn’t allow for integrated management of additional development tools and binaries, useful for e.g. JavaScript-testing (besides the fact that Bower is kind of considered to be deprecated these days).

There are different ways of bundling Javascript, but since Rails 5.1, yarn is the defacto choice for Rails.

Installing Yarn

You can install yarn either trough npm npm install -g yarn, or if you’re on a mac, using homebrew: brew install yarn. I chose the latter.

To prepare your rails project run rails yarn:install.

Add tape for testing JavaScript & Coffeescript

There are [different testing fram…