This guide presents accumulated wisdom from person-years of Spree use.

Upgrade Considerations

The important commands

spree -update was removed in favor of Bundler.

Before updating, you will want to ensure the installed spree gem is up-to-date by modifying Gemfile to match the new spree version and run bundle update.

Thanks to Rails 3.1 Mountable Engine, the update process is “non-destructive” than in previous versions of Spree. The core files are encapsulated separately from sandbox, thus upgrading to newer files will not override nor replace sandbox’s customized files.

This makes it easier to see when and how some file has changed – which is often useful if you need to update a customized version.

Dos and Don’ts

Try to avoid modifying config/boot.rb and config/environment.rb: use initializers instead.

Tracking changes for overridden code

Be aware that core changes might have an impact on the components you have overridden in your project. You might need to patch your local copies, or ensure that such copies interact correctly with changed code (e.g. using appropriate ids in HTML to allow the JavaScript to work).

If you can help us generalise the core code so that your preferred effect is achieved by altering a few parameters, this will be more useful than duplicating several files. Ideas and suggestions are always welcome.

Initializers

Initializers are run during startup, and are the recommended way to execute certain settings. You can put initializers in extensions, thus have a way to execute extension-specific configurations.

See the extensions guide for more information.

Debugging techniques

Use tests!

Use rake spec and rake test to test basic functioning after you’ve made changes.

Analysing crashes on a non-local machine

If you’re testing on a server, whether in production or development mode, the following code in one of your FOO_extension.rb files might save some time. It triggers local behaviour for users who have an admin role. One useful consequence is that uncaught exceptions will show the detailed error page instead of 404.html, so you don’t have to hunt through the server logs.

Spree::BaseController.class_eval do
  def local_request?
    ENV["RAILS_ENV"] !="production" || current_user.present? &&
      current_user.has_role?(:admin)
  end
end

Managing large projects

To fork or not to fork…

Suppose there’s a few details of Spree that you want to override due to personal or client preference, but which aren’t the usual things that you’d override (like views) - so something like tweaks to the models or controllers.

You could hide these away in your site extension, but they could get mixed up with your real site customizations. You could also fork Spree and run your site on this forked version, but this can also be a headache to get right. There’s also the hassle of tracking changes to spree/master and pulling them into your project at the right time.

So here’s a compromise: have an extra extension, say spree-tweaks, to contain your small collection of modified files, which is loaded first in the extension order. The benefits are:

  • it’s clear what you are overriding, and easier to check against core changes
  • you can base your project on an official gem release or a spree/master commit stage
  • such tweaks can become part of your client site project and be managed with SCM etc.

If you find yourself wanting extensive changes to core, this technique probably won’t work so well. But then again, if this is the case, then you probably want to look seriously at splitting some code off into stand-alone extensions and then see whether any of the other code should be contributed to the core.