Generating with Ruby OFF Rails

I'm spending a fair amount of my time working on non-Rails Ruby projects lately and I've been missing the fine code generation toys in Rails. So tonight, for the fun of it and because I was hankering to play with cucumber, I hacked up the minimal set of bits that gets you script/generate in your non-Rails project.

This is how we do it:

> mkdir my_non_rails_proj
> cd my_non_rails_proj
> mkdir script config
> touch config/environment.rb
> cat > config/boot.rb
RAILS_ROOT = "#{File.dirname(__FILE__)}/.." unless defined?(RAILS_ROOT)
RAILS_ENV = nil
require 'rubygems'
require 'initializer'

Rails.configuration = Rails::Configuration.new
^D
> cp -p /path/to/gems/rails-2.3.2/bin/generate script/.
> ./script/generate
Usage: ./script/generate generator [options] [args]
Rails Info:
 -v, --version     Show the Rails version number and quit.
 -h, --help      Show this help message and quit.
[...]
> ./script/generate cucumber
  create features/step_definitions
  create features/step_definitions/webrat_steps.rb
  create features/support
  create features/support/env.rb
  create features/support/paths.rb
  create lib/tasks
  create lib/tasks/cucumber.rake
  create script/cucumber
> touch Rakefile
> rake features
[... large lack of FAIL ...]
>

Voila! Not guaranteed to work for all Rails generators, but it bootstrapped rspec and cucumber just fine, which was the point of my exercise. Someday I'll make a generator:bootstrap rake task or gem something if I need to do it again.