One night at a Boston Ruby hackfest, I finally got sick of using the Rails default generators, and then having to twiddle them to meet my needs and tastes. This includes using things like:

• shoulda
• factory_girl
• haml
• blueprint

The next morning, I was struck awake at 5am with the inspiration to start implementing it. shoulda_generator is the result of this effort.

• A new model
• A migration for the model
• Skip using --skip-migration
• A factory defined with factory_girl
• Skip using --skip-factory
• A shoulda unit test with a few simple 'should's

• shoulda installed as a plugin
• factory_girl gem installed

• Everything included in shoulda_model
• A controller (sans unnecessary comments)
• Choice of haml (default) or ERB
  • Specify which with the --templating option
• Simple layout styled with blueprint
  • Skip using --skip-layout
• A helper
• A shoulda functional test using factory_girl factory, using should_be_restful or not
  • Specify with --functional-test-style, accepts basic and should_be_restful

• shoulda installed as a plugin
• factory_girl gem installed
• haml gem installed on the system, and the project has been hamlified using haml --rails

shoulda_generator is available as a gem via GitHub. If you haven't done so already, you need to setup GitHub as a gem source:

$ gem sources -a http://gems.github.com

Now you can install it:

$ sudo gem install technicalpickles-shoulda_generator

Usage is the same as the default Rails generators.

$ script/generate shoulda_model post title:string body:text published:boolean 
$ script/generate shoulda_scaffold post title:string body:text published:boolean

You can override the default values for templating by placing a .shoulda_generator file in your home directory.

Here's an example .shoulda_generator:

:templating: erb              # supported options: haml|erb

Source is hosted on GitHub: http://github.com/technicalpickles/shoulda_generator/tree/master

You can do the usual fork/commit cycle until you have something ready to share. Send pull requests my way.