fredit: front-end edit

fredit is a very simple, no-frills Rails 3 Engine that lets you edit your Rails application's view templates, css stylesheets, and javascript files (a.k.a front-end files) through the browser.

fredit injects an edit link into every view template. These edit links are visible wherever the template is rendered, whether it is a layout, a page, or a partial.

By clicking on these links, you call up a edit page that will let you directly edit the source. An update button lets you save these changes and alter the underlying source files.

In addition to view templates, stylesheets and javascript files are accessible through a file selection drop down at the top of the fredit edit page.

You can also create and delete front-end files on the fredit edit page.

On a current Rails project, I needed to delegate responsibility for improving the copy, the styling, and the user interface to another person. Let's call this person "Chad." Chad:

• is not a Ruby or Rails programmer
• knows HTML and CSS
• can make perfect sense of ERB, Rails partials, and basic Ruby constructs found in ERB after a few minutes of explanation
• can use a web browser interface to edit files

Setting up a full Rails development environment on Chad's computer can be a pain.

Another option is to integrate a CMS into your Rails app. But this adds dependencies and code bloat.

fredit is another option. It lets capable non-Rails programmers to help you on the front-end of a Rails app, with minimal overhead.

Just run a fredit-enabled instance of your Rails app on a server that he or she can access through a web browser. This fredit-able instance can have its own Rails environment, database, and git branch. You probably put a copy of your app on a staging server anyway, so you can use that instance for fredit-ing.

fredit requires Rails 3. fredit should work with all Rails-compatible templating engines as of version 0.2.0.

fredit works best as a gem you include in a specific Rails environment. Put something like this in the Gemfile of your Rails app:

source 'http://rubygems.org'

[lines omitted]

group :staging do
  gem 'fredit'
end

and then run RAILS_ENV=staging bundle install, adjusting the RAILS_ENV to your target environment.

To run your Rails app with fredit, just start it in the Rails environment corresponding to the Gemfile group you put fredit in. When you hit the app in the browser, you should see the injected view template links and be able to click through them to fredit's source code editor.

fredit assumes that the Rails instance it is running on is a git repository. It also assumes that you have set the current branch of this git repository to the one you want your collaborator's changes committed to.

When your collaborator makes changes, fredit will commit those changes on the current git branch of this clone of the git repository. There is a form field in the fredit editor for the collaborator to enter git author information and a git log message. These bits of information will be added as metadata to the git commit.

When you're ready to review and merge the changes your collaborator made via fredit, it's all just a matter of working with git commits and branches. You can set up client-side git hooks on the fredit-enabled clone to notify you when your collaborator has made changes, to automatically push those changes to the appropriate branch in the upstream repository, run a CI build server, etc.

Currently, fredit has only rudimentary security features. fredit will not allow any user to use the fredit web interface to edit a file above or outside the Rails application root directory of that Rails instance. But this still leaves things like database.yml configurations accessible to the fredit editor. Anyone with access to the fredit editing interface will have the power to run arbitrary SQL on your environment's database.

So please take additional precautions to make sure that your fredit-enabled Rails instance can't be accessed by hostile strangers. At a minimum, use Basic Authentication or the like to restrict access to this entire Rails instance.

It's probably not a good idea to run a fredit-enabled Rails app on a server with important stuff on it. Use a scratch staging server.

Feel free to fork and take this simple idea wherever you want to. The current version of this project is really just a quick and dirty implementation that I needed pronto. Pull requests are very welcome.

Fredit is distributed under the MIT-LICENSE.