Update on this: We do now include Turbo by default and the "Cable Collections" feature in the linked video has been completely reimplemented by the CableReady team in a feature called "Updatable", which we now use in Bullet Train. You can learn more about it at https://cableready.stimulusreflex.com/guide/updatable.html . Very grateful for the work they did on this and grateful to not have to maintain a proprietary reactivity library going forward!
Not at all! You can use Bullet Train and Avo together or you can use them independently. Avo is the recommended admin library to use with Bullet Train.
Yes, this is true that we lean heavily into Tailwind CSS by default. However, when I implemented our "new" component system in 2021, I designed it so that there was a path forward for Bullet Train on vanilla CSS or Bootstrap if anyone wanted to implement it. I don't have any plans to do it myself, but people (including Tamik, the original theme author for Bullet Train) have expressed an interest. I'd love to see it happen. You can get a sense for how this would be possible from our theme docs at https://bullettrain.co/docs/themes.
Wow, hi everyone! Was just about to walk over for the first day of RailsConf when a friend let me know we were #1 here! Honored!
I'm the original creator of Bullet Train, although a number of people now work on it. It's been a fun journey to this point!
When I first started building Bullet Train, it was a relatively unique offering. There weren't that many full-featured "SaaS starter kits" out there, although there was some prior art. The biggest inspiration for Bullet Train was what Laravel Spark was at the time. In fact, one of the guys who had got me into Rails in the first place had started building his next product on Laravel so they could take advantage of Spark!
These days there are an abundance of SaaS starter kits available in most ecosystems. I've had the pleasure of meeting and interacting with the authors of a bunch of high-quality starter kits built in different languages and frameworks and some of them have told me they were inspired in part by Bullet Train. I love that.
If you're interested in Rails and SaaS, we're running a conference in Athens, Greece on June 1–2 this year and we'd love to have you! https://railssaas.com
It's so amazing to see how the tech community inspires and learns from one another. Laravel found inspiration from Rails. Then, seeing Bullet Train was inspired back from the Laravel ecosystem with Laravel Spark.
In the past, I was jealous of the Ruby ecosystem with an extremely large community (the grass is always greener on the other side?). And, thinking the JavaScript ecosystem was left behind, but now I am hopeful that the JavaScript ecosystem has finally caught up.
I can totally confirm Bullet Train is an inspiration for many SaaS Boilerplates. I was personally inspired by Bullet Train to build Nextless.js [1], a Next.js based SaaS Boilerplate, bringing SaaS starter kits in Next.js/React/JavaScript ecosystem.
I'm trying to move a company that is now selling simple wordpress websites (and doing actually pretty well, do to their super expertise with design/graphic and marketing) to a 'higher' step with RoR, and BT seems something that may help them a lot approaching Rails.
Can anybody suggests resources, links, advice on how to start this new adventure?
ColdBox is a seventeen year old open source ColdFusion framework originally inspired by Laravel. The parent company is Ortus and they have offices in North America, Central America and Europe.
Yeah, you're not alone. Aaron posted a thread on Twitter that shares the inside skinny on what it took to ship this course (https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/1638191349261377539) but I had an early peek into the work he was doing on this course, and there was a clear inflection point in the project when he joined Planetscale and had the benefit of being able to focus a substantial amount of his time on it in addition to all the work other members of the team there were able to contribute to it. Very grateful that Planetscale unlocked this so it's available as a free resource instead of having to be behind a paywall to support its creator.
1. Yes, it does. I use AdBlock Pro.
2. Yes, it does. I've been using Safari as my primary browser as a Rails developer for at least the past decade and have always found the developer tools at least adequate. I don't use the developer tools on other browsers heavily, so I don't know if I might be missing something.
[Edit] I'm wrong about this- "Adblock Pro no longer exists for Safari (in the form of an "official" extension)." It still exists, as "AdBlock Pro for Safari" developed by Crypto, Inc. but was not listed on Apple's extension site for some strange reason: https://apps.apple.com/us/story/id1377753262
The listed adblocker is: "AdBlock for Safari" developed by BETAFISH INC, which offers in-app purchases including "Gold Upgrade" which "unlocks" some basic features that gorhill's uBlock Origin already has for every other browser.
I have no trust in an ad blocker extension (which has access to any site you visit) published by an entity that is in the domain of crypto currencies. An adblocker is the best way to hide malware that steals money.
I used to run Safari on my mac and it was the best thing in the world:
- It integrated perfectly with the OS
- It saved battery like heeeeell
- It integrated natively with Airpods and media keys
- It clearly had worse performance than Chrome and a couple of incompatibilities, but it was perfectly acceptable
- I could run most of my extensions, namely uBlock Origin, HTTPS Everywhere and Reddit Enhancement Suite
- The native PiP (before it was on any other browser) was AMAZING
I had been a diehard Chrome user since it came out (with the comic book!) on Windows, Linux and macOS. I got fed up with how slow it was becoming and how it was running my fans all the time.
Unfortunately, two things happened that made me quit Safari:
- I found some weird bug wherein whenever I typed an address in the address bar it would always slow down to a crawl
- Apple deprecated and abandoned old extensions. So I lost most of my very valuable extensions, with emphasis on uBlock Origin and Reddit Enhancement Suite. I could live with a different adblocker (I saw adguard at the time), but I could not live without RES. No way.
So I left Safari and have since moved to Firefox. It seems almost as fast as Chrome, has nice integrations and features, but it's no Safari. It still drains my battery and has issues. Firefox has since progressively added PiP (even if it's not native) and support for media keys, which was a godsend, so that's nice.
I'd like to get back to Safari. It would be amazing. Do you know if there is any way for me to get what I used to have back? uBlock Origin (or something with compatible filter lists and custom rules) and Reddit Enhancement Suite?
Hey KRains, author of Bullet Train here! Congratulations on your launch and making the front page of HN! I know how great a feeling that is after all your hard work!
I disagree that Bullet Train is "really overpriced". The features it provides to customers can save them hundreds of hours of development time in total. There are individual features in Bullet Train (the teams functionality, the Stripe integration, outbound webhooks, scaffolding real-time chat conversation threads onto models and an inbox for all of them, Zapier integration, just to name a few) that would each save most development teams at least $1,450 in development costs, and that's before you take into account the power of Super Scaffolding for code generation.
Bullet Train will save most development teams months in effort right off the bat. That's well worth $1,450 to the customers who have been able to get to market faster with components they know are being used and maintained across many different products. Bullet Train is only two years old, and there are already folks running seven-figure businesses around products that cost five-figures to build using Bullet Train. I'm not trying to imply it's magic, I'm just trying to point out that there are situations where $1,450 can be a no-brainer.
I love that you're starting with an open source base. If I knew when I started what I now know after two years of selling Bullet Train, I would probably do something similar. But you will need (as I've needed and as others who are doing similar projects have needed) help along the way. (For example, you'll definitely want to get the support of a designer.) Unless you want to bring those people on as partners, that help will cost you money, sometimes lots of it, so make sure you're charging enough for your premium components to pay for the help you need to make the product a success and the best it can be.
Thanks for your great comment, really appreciate it!
You are right, I'm very excited on this experience! Even if it's not the first time when I publish my products here, I never had such level of attention.
Well, I'm looking right now from my personal point of view and your price looks "a little bit" high to me. I know I can do almost everything you already have in your project and maybe more, and if I would like to create my own SaaS right now, I wouldn't pay so much.
But if considers only corporate customers like established companies or well-funded startup, of course, your price is just nothing. The problem is I'm still looking for my niche, ideal customers etc. and I see this price is high for many of them.
My goal is to provide a democratic price that would be moderate for individuals and companies but would be different for them. I'm thinking to charge per seat as an individual can buy just one license and it will not be hard for him/her and companies would pay much more just because they would have more seats. But it's still plans (yet).
Thanks again for your advice and comment, good luck to you too!
Honestly, can you think of a smarter move on the part of Microsoft than making Nat Friedman (a veteran of the Open Source community) CEO of Github? I completely trust this guy to do as good a job as can be done of guiding Github forward as a product and a platform, now that the venture capitalists are no longer in the picture.
Hey Weston, with regard to servers and deployment, I think Heroku is a very turn-key solution. These days you can have a default `app.json` in your project and use it to click a button to deploy your app to a totally new development or production server including any databases and third-party add-ons you need provisioned for the app. It's pretty magical. For CI, I use Codeship. The combination of those two vastly minimizes my responsibility for infrastructure.
On the development side, I still think Rails is an excellent choice, but I also felt a lot of the same pain you're expressing, but instead of with server configuration, I started feeling it more specifically with the redundancy of putting together the same libraries over and over for each app.
To try to revive the joy of creating new projects, I created Bullet Train (https://bullettrain.co), which I describe as "Rails on Rails". It's an app template with authentication (Devise), authorization (CanCanCan), subscriptions (Koudoku), teams, invitations, OAuth integrations, etc. all wrapped in a consistent theme with a full feature-level test suite.
It also has a powerful code generation/scaffolding engine for pumping out CRUD views and controllers for the web, API endpoints, API documentation, and soon it'll handle your Zapier integration as well. (Posted a demo video of this here at https://twitter.com/andrewculver/status/934251715175395328) It also has a thin layer of conventions on top of vanilla Rails, like namespacing the public vs. account sections of an app. It's stuff that most of us were doing previously, just slightly different from app to app, and this is an attempt to standardize so we can build other magic on top of it.
As a demo, a few months ago I used Bullet Train + Heroku to build and launch a simple Trello clone in two hours: https://bt-cardboard.herokuapp.com/ . It's limited, and I haven't come back to it since, but I thought the end result was a powerful example of what you can get done quickly when you're using the right tools. (I have a video recording of the entire process which I'll upload to YouTube if anyone is interested in seeing it.)
Anyway, I wouldn't normally peddle my wares on HN, but the whole point of Bullet Train is to try to achieve new levels of developer productivity and happiness, which seemed relevant to the question you were asking. There's nothing quite like this in the Python world (I'm frequently told by Python developers,) but there probably should be, and I imagine it's just a matter of time before there is.
