This is a good idea though I would suggest keeping Action Mailer. If I were just starting with Rails and had to deal with webpacker, I probably would have skipped it altogether.

This can be set in your .railsrc file in Home directory, like default flags for running rails new

# .railsrc
-d postgresql
--skip-action-mailbox
--skip-active-storage
--skip-action-cable
--skip-spring
--skip-sprockets
--skip-turbolinks
-T
--webpacker=react

Instead of skipping few of the frameworks by default, making command line interactive will be good.

rails new chotu --interactive

- Install Action Cable? Yes/no?

-

Instead of skipping few of the frameworks by default, making command line interactive will be good.

@prathamesh-sonpatki sounds good, from the discussion I linked above, dhh mentioned 3 things, interactive mode, minimal mode, and add stacks back in if you left them out.

Hopefully will tackle them in separate PR's, actually I'm going to mention that in the description above. If DHH drops the minimal for interactive, I will just go ahead and do that in this PR 👍

This can be set in your .railsrc file in Home directory,

@IvanShamatov cool, this came out of the discussion linked in the description, we are going to provide an easy way to create a minimal rails app via the cli

I like the idea of both minimal and interactive. Minimal really should be truly minimal, though. No webpacker, no Turbolinks, no action mailer, etc. Just action pack + active record (and the dependencies, railties + active support etc).

@prathamesh-sonpatki

Instead of skipping few of the frameworks by default, making command line interactive will be good.

rails new chotu --interactive
> - Install Action Cable? Yes/no?

The interactive mode would certainly benefit experienced developers, but it would help new/inexperienced people the most. Therefore instead of displaying only a module name (not necessarily previously known to a new developer), it would be good to display more information than that. And here we can have two possible solutions:

1. Automatically explain what this specific option means and what it is used for. Short and to the point (maybe with an official documentation URL, which explains this module in more detail).
2. In addition to "Yes/No" also allow to choose "Help", which would explain the purpose and the ramifications of enabling/disabling the module in more detail. Since the help was requested separately, it means that the user is fine with getting more text on the screen.
3. Both. Automatically display a short description, but when requested separately, explain the module in even more detail.

What about to call it "classic" instead of "minimal?

I'd like us to really go minimal here, so let's add a few more skips:

• skip_system_tests (and minimal has this on)
• skip_jbuilder (and minimal has this on)

But then, conversely, we should consider actually preconfiguring sprockets for JavaScript in this mode.

We should also allow you to start from the negative --minimal base, and then add things back in. So --minimal --webpack=react should work and do the right thing.

Did you want to remove these from --minimal too?

group :development do
  # Access an interactive console on exception pages or by calling 'console' anywhere in the code.
  gem 'web-console', '>= 3.3.0'
  # Display performance information such as SQL time and flame graphs for each request in your browser.
  # Can be configured to work on production as well see: https://github.com/MiniProfiler/rack-mini-profiler/blob/master/README.md
  gem 'rack-mini-profiler', '~> 2.0'
  gem 'listen', '~> 3.2'
end

Let's just leave that stuff there for now. Although that listen gem looks like maybe it should have been part of skip spring? Thought that was what it was for?

  # Use an evented file watcher to asynchronously detect changes in source code,
  # routes, locales, etc. This feature depends on the listen gem.
  config.file_watcher = ActiveSupport::EventedFileUpdateChecker

So no, we need the listen gem.

Actually, on second thought, let's remove the rack-mini-profiler and the web-console. Maybe something like skip_dev_gems or something. Point of --minimal is to pare this all the way down.

  # Use an evented file watcher to asynchronously detect changes in source code,
  # routes, locales, etc. This feature depends on the listen gem.
  <%= '# ' unless depend_on_listen? %>config.file_watcher = ActiveSupport::EventedFileUpdateChecker

We use to the EventedFileUpdateChecker when the listen gem has been added, otherwise we stay with the default FileUpdateChecker (I was digging into this a while back, so not sure about the full context if we only use the FileUpdateChecker)

Will leave the listen gem 👍

@dhh this is ready, let me know if there is anything I have missed?

Will review and test. It looks good, just want to test.

I've been stuck testing this because rails webpacker:install no longer runs for me on master. Haven't diagnosed it fully. I'm fine on the 6.0.3 release, but running this task on master just hangs. I don't think it's specific to this PR, though. But need to figure it out before we can move forward.

Sorry, I was stuck due to a recursive issue with bin/yarn (it'll loop on itself if you have ./bin in your path!). Now that I've run things through, it generally seems good, but I noticed that Active Job is still included by default. Let's take that out.

Otherwise, I think we're good with a rebase to merge.

but I noticed that Active Job is still included by default. Let's take that out.

Cool, that's been done 👍

Awesome!

❤️

Just wondering if it's worth to add what is remaining when using minimal somewhere in the documentation, at first saw it wasn't clear for me.

I can confirm that attempting to use this as a base, and selectively re-enabling libraries using --no-skip-* is currently not working. Will have a look and see if I can chip in here.

$ rails -v
Rails 6.1.0