I’ve talked a lot about the Nifty Generators gem, created by Ryan Bates of Railscasts (see my introductions to nifty_layout, nifty_config, and nifty_scaffold). When I began experimenting with Rails 3 I noticed that the gem was not yet Rails 3 compatible according to RailsPlugins.org, but I’m happy to report (along with RailsPlugins.org users eggie5 and dgerton) that it’s working fine—you just need to change a few things about how you use it. Here’s what you need to do to get rolling:
Unlike apps written in previous versions of Rails, your Rails 3 app needs to know you’re using Nifty Generators. Easy enough: Add the following line to your Gemfile:
gem 'nifty-generators', '>= 0.4.0'
then install it if necessary, using Bundler:
$ bundle install
This is the biggest difference, and it’s actually pretty minor. Replace the underscore in the old way of using the generator with a colon. So the old way of generating a scaffold, like
$ script/generate nifty_scaffold book title:string author_id:integer description:text
becomes
$ rails generate nifty:scaffold book title:string author_id:integer description:text
For a list of all four Nifty Generators’ new syntax, just type
$ rails generate -h
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