Andrei Maxim andreimaxim

The Unofficial 37signals/DHH Rails Style Guide

About This Document

This style guide was generated by Claude Code through deep analysis of the Fizzy codebase - 37signals' open-source project management tool.

Why Fizzy matters: While 37signals has long advocated for "vanilla Rails" and opinionated software design, their production codebases (Basecamp, HEY, etc.) have historically been closed source. Fizzy changes that. For the first time, developers can study a real 37signals/DHH-style Rails application - not just blog posts and conference talks, but actual production code with all its patterns, trade-offs, and deliberate omissions.

How this was created: Claude Code analyzed the entire codebase - routes, controllers, models, concerns, views, JavaScript, CSS, tests, and configuration. The goal was to extract not just what patterns are used, but why - inferring philosophy from implementation choices.

Using Unicorn with Upstart

This configuration works with Upstart on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

The reason why it needs to be done this way (i.e. with the pre-start and post-stop stanzas), is because Upstart is unable to track whever Unicorn master process re-execs itself on hot deploys. One can use it without hot-deploys and run Unicorn in foreground also, it then only needs one exec stanza.

This presumes you are not using RVM, so no voodoo dances.

Patched ruby 1.9.3-p125 for 30% faster rails boot

What is?

This script installs a patched version of ruby 1.9.3-p125 with patches to make ruby-debug work again (#47) and boot-time performance improvements (#66 and #68), and runtime performance improvements (#83 and #84). It also includes the new backported GC from ruby-trunk.

Huge thanks to funny-falcon for the performance patches.

ruby-1.9.3-p484 cumulative performance patch for rbenv

This installs a patched ruby 1.9.3-p484 with the railsexpress patchsets: https://github.com/skaes/rvm-patchsets

Requirements

You will also need a C Compiler. If you're on Linux, you probably already have one or know how to install one. On OS X, you should install XCode, and brew install autoconf using homebrew.

ruby-1.9.3-p385 cumulative performance patch for rbenv

This installs a patched ruby 1.9.3-p385 with various performance improvements and a backported COW-friendly GC, all courtesy of funny-falcon.

Requirements

You will also need a C Compiler. If you're on Linux, you probably already have one or know how to install one. On OS X, you should install XCode, and brew install autoconf using homebrew.

	# Libraries and infrastructure
	sudo apt update -y
	sudo apt install -y \
	docker.io docker-buildx \
	build-essential pkg-config autoconf bison rustc cargo clang \
	libssl-dev libreadline-dev zlib1g-dev libyaml-dev libreadline-dev libncurses5-dev libffi-dev libgdbm-dev libjemalloc2 \
	libvips imagemagick libmagickwand-dev mupdf mupdf-tools \
	redis-tools sqlite3 libsqlite3-0 libmysqlclient-dev \
	rbenv apache2-utils

	module CacheKeyMonkeyPatch
	module ActiveRecord
	module Integration

	# Returns a cache key that can be used to identify this record.
	#
	# ==== Examples
	#
	# Product.new.cache_key # => "products/new"
	# Product.find(5).cache_key # => "products/5" (updated_at / last_modified_time not available)

	FROM ubuntu

	RUN apt-get update
	RUN apt-get install -y build-essential curl

	# NodeJS >= 6.0
	RUN curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_8.x \| bash -
	RUN apt-get install -y nodejs

	# ttfautohint

	unicorn_profiles="dev prod"

	unicorn_dev_enable="yes"
	unicorn_dev_user="devuser"
	unicorn_dev_listen="/tmp/unicorn.dev.socket"
	unicorn_dev_dir="/usr/local/www/dev"
	unicorn_dev_config="/usr/local/www/dev/config.ru"
	unicorn_dev_env="development"
	unicorn_dev_flags="" # any additional flags
	unicorn_dev_rails="YES" # For rails

	require 'syslog'
	require 'daemonize/version'

	module Daemonize
	APP_NAME = "ruby_daemon"
	PID_FILE = APP_NAME + ".pid"
	CWD = "."

	# The code that will actually daemonize a process. It is
	# based on the coding rules specified in the 13th chapter