Spine

Spine.app is a Spine application generator. It'll create the basic application structure, as well as controllers and models. This can then be served up, or compiled, using Hem.

Spine.app is an excellent way of getting started with Spine applications, and a highly recommended workflow.

Installation

First, if you haven't got them installed already, you'll need Node and npm. Then, to install Spine.app:

npm install -g spine.app

Spine.app will now be available globally under the spine executable.

Generating your application

To generate your application, use the app generator like so:

spine app my_app

Spine.app will generate the initial application files, which look like this:

./app
./app/controllers
./app/controllers/.gitkeep
./app/index.coffee
./app/models
./app/models/.gitkeep
./app/views
./app/views/.gitkeep
./css
./css/index.styl
./package.json
./Procfile
./public
./public/favicon.ico
./public/index.html
./slug.json

The Procfile is for Heroku, which we'll cover later. slug.json is for Hem, see the article on that for more information. The rest is your classical MVC structure, which should look very familiar to you if you've used Rails.

Now cd into your application directory, and you can generate some controllers, models and serve up the application.

Generating controllers

Simple enough, just use the controller generator, specifying the name of the controller.

spine controller users

In the example above, Spine will generate a controller under ./app/controllers/users.coffee

Spine = require('spine')

class Users extends Spine.Controller
  constructor: ->
    super

module.exports = Users

By convention, your controllers should be plural and your models singular. Spine.app does nothing to enforce this, it's up to you.

Generating models

Use the models generator, specifying the name of the model.

spine model user

In the example above, Spine will generate a model under ./app/models/user.coffee

Spine = require('spine')

class User extends Spine.Model
  @configure "User"

Serving your application

As soon as it's generated, your application is all ready to be served using Hem. Firstly, you'll need to install Hem, and your application's dependencies:

npm install .
npm install -g hem

And now we can use Hem to serve up the application:

hem server

For more information regarding Hem, please see the Hem Guide.

Building your application

You can also use Hem to build your application. This will serialize all your JavaScript/CoffeeScript to one file (./public/application.js), and all your CSS/Stylus (./public/application.css). You'll need to do this before pushing your site to a remote server, so it can be served statically.

hem build

Heroku

Now that your application has been serialized to disk using hem build, you can deploy it. Heroku is a great option for serving Node.js and Rails applications.

If you take a peek inside package.json, you'll see that there's a dependency on ace. Ace is a super simple static file server, and all we need to serve up our application in production. Our application's Procfile looks like this:

web: ace ./public

This instructs Heroku to use Ace to serve up the application's public directory.

Now, all we need to deploy our app is run a few Heroku commands. You'll need to install the Heroku gem if you haven't already.

heroku create my-spine-app --stack cedar
git add .
git commit -m "first deploy"
git push heroku master
heroku open

Voila! Your Spine application has been deployed.