Quick Lucky addons with the Bloat gem

Introduction

In newer tools with less fleshed out community tooling, adding libraries can be a pain. For example, when I first got started with the excellent Lucky web framework, I had a hard time getting TailwindCSS set up so that I could scaffold a simple app and see how it worked.

I also noticed the Rails community solving this painpoint with sites like RailsBytes, and yearned for something similar that I could use in any application and any framework.

The Bloat Gem

To that end, I created the bloat gem (https://github.com/stephendolan/bloat), which is essentially just a wrapper around Thor’s apply method. It allows you to execute templates from RailsBytes or any other template repository with Thor commands within any directory structure.

Example: TailwindCSS in Lucky

Adding TailwindCSS to a Lucky app is as simple as:

gem install bloat

cd {lucky_app_directory}

bloat with https://railsbytes.com/script/VeKsGg

You can see the content of that template, which simply applies the Laravel Mix TailwindCSS Install instructions to the Lucky file structure here.

Example: StimulusJS in Lucky

StimulusJS can be set up just as easily, with a few more benefits like asking the user if they want a sample file, and, if so, adding a hello_controller.js file with some comments explaining the different components!

gem install bloat

cd {lucky_app_directory}

bloat with https://railsbytes.com/script/zl0sKQ

You can see the contents of this template here.