Renaming Ruby on Rails application

Question

Is there a way to rename the application in Rails 2?

Answer 1

Rails 2 doesn't really have a concept of an application 'name'. The only thing that identifies your app is the name of the folder itself.

In Rails 3, it's a little different. Rails 3 projects are name-spaced to a module defined in config/application.rb. This application module is used to house your app, and you'll see it referenced by your config.ru, config/routes.rb, config/environment.rb and all the environments defined in config/environments/.

If you were to open a terminal session and run the command rails new myapp, your config/application.rb file would define the module Myapp, inside which will be defined an Application class, which extends Rails::Application. All the other files will reference Myapp::Application.

In both Rails 2 and 3, you will find a string key for your session defined in config/initializers/session_store.rb, which takes the default value of '_<myapp>_session'. It's not really tied to the "name" of your application, though you should try to keep it in sync to prevent any accidental session key name conflicts with other apps.

Answer 2

I had some trouble renaming a Rails 3 app. I then found this plugin and it works like a charm.

Answer 3

I've written the following script to do just that. You can see it also at https://gist.github.com/danielpclark/8dfcdd7ac63149323bbc

#!/usr/bin/ruby
# Rename Rails Project (File: rename_rails)
# Copyright 6ft Dan(TM) / MIT License
# Check the config/application.rb for capital usage in project name by model OldProjectName
# Usage: rename_rails OldProjectName NewAwesomeName

# Replace string instances of project name   
`grep -lR #{ARGV[0]} | xargs sed -i 's/#{ARGV[0]}/#{ARGV[1]}/g'`
`grep -lR #{ARGV[0].downcase} | xargs sed -i 's/#{ARGV[0].downcase}/#{ARGV[1].downcase}/g'`

# Rename Rails directory if it exists
if File.directory?(ARGV[0])
    `mv #{ARGV[0]} #{ARGV[1]}`
    drc = ARGV[1]
elsif File.directory?(ARGV[0].downcase)
    `mv #{ARGV[0].downcase} #{ARGV[1]}`
    drc = ARGV[1]
end

# Delete temporary files (helps prevent errors)
drc ||= ''
if ['cache','pids','sessions','sockets'].all? {
        |direc| File.directory?(File.join(drc,'tmp', direc)) }
    FileUtils.rm_rf(File.join(drc,'tmp'))
end

And I've created a howto video on YouTube. http://youtu.be/dDw2RmczcDA

Answer 4

You can use https://github.com/morshedalam/rename to rename Rails 3 application

Answer 5

just rename the application directory, nothing more. I did it several times, no issues.

Answer 6

Number of places in your files where your app must be renamed (Rails 3.1) or you will not be able to start your server. So do the following:

1) Rename the directory

2) Rename module (yourapp) in the Application.rb file.

3) Rename (yourapp)::Application in the following files:

environment.rb

routes.rb

config.ru

Rakefile

initializers/secret_token.rb

initializers/session_store.rb

environments/test.rb, production.rb and development.rb

4) You can also rename the databases in config.database.yml.sqlite3 to (yourapp)_development, (yourapp)_test etc. It may be necessary reload your databases in this case. I used the yaml_db gem and rake db:reload to do this and worked.

That should do it.