---
title: 'Danger, Danger: High Voltage! Use Rails 3.1 for Static Sites'
teaser: Building a quick static site on Rails with High Voltage.
tags: web,rails,high_voltage
author: Nick Quaranto
published_on: 2011-10-21
---

I'm a big fan of [Jekyll](http://jekyllrb.com), but boy do I love
[SCSS](http://sass-lang.com/) and
[CoffeeScript](http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/). I recently set out
to create a static site using Rails 3.1, to take advantage of the lovely
[Sprockets](https://github.com/sstephenson/sprockets) integration. There are
alternatives (like [Middleman](http://middlemanapp.com/), and
[Octopress](http://octopress.org/)) but I wanted to use Rails itself instead.

Our homebrewed [high_voltage](http://github.com/thoughtbot/high_voltage) gem
allows for static pages, so I wanted to use that to hook up my little static
site that will eventually be dynamic. Here's the process I used.

Before we start, [watch this video](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a4gyJsY0mc).

## Fire in the disco

Generate the app:

    gem install bundler --pre
    gem install rails --no-ri --no-rdoc
    rails new danger_danger

Swap out your `Gemfile` with:

```ruby
source 'http://rubygems.org'

gem 'rails', '3.1.1'

gem 'flutie'
gem 'high_voltage'
gem 'jquery-rails'
gem 'redcarpet'

gem 'sass-rails',   '~> 3.1.4'
gem 'coffee-rails', '~> 3.1.1'
gem 'uglifier', '>= 1.0.3'
```

Rebundle and let's remove some other cruft:

    bundle
    rm config/database.yml public/index.html
    rm -rf app/{helpers,mailers,models} test/ doc/ db/

Rails includes *all* of the subframeworks (ActiveRecord, ActionMailer, etc) by
default. We don't need those, so at the top of `config/application.rb`, you can
replace `require 'rails/all'` with:

```ruby
    require 'rails'
    require 'action_controller/railtie'
```

There's references to ActionMailer in the various `config/environments/`
files...it's best to just comment them for now since we may want it back later.

```ruby
# comment out this in config/environments/development.rb
config.action_mailer.raise_delivery_errors = false

# comment out this in config/environments/test.rb
config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :test
```

I want to write templates in Markdown, so we'll need to tell Rails to handle
that. Drop this into `config/initializers/redcarpet.rb`, thanks to [this
gist](https://gist.github.com/1177847). Hopefully in future versions of Rails
this will be easier if [Tilt](http://github.com/rtomayko/tilt) is integrated
into ActionView.

```ruby
class ActionView::Template
  class Redcarpet < Handler
    include Handlers::Compilable

    def compile template
      ::Redcarpet.new(template.source).to_html.inspect
    end
  end

  register_template_handler :md, Redcarpet
end
```

Let's start with just a homepage. Change `vim` to your editor of choice!

    mkdir app/views/pages
    vim app/views/pages/home.html.md

In that file, you can write Markdown as normal:

```markdown
# Welcome to the home page!

This should say something important.
```

In your `config/routes.rb`, point to it:

```ruby
root :to => 'high_voltage/pages#show', :id => 'home'
```

Fire up your server, and you should be able to see your home page!

    rails server

Awesome! You should now see your home page rendered in markdown. What's even
better is that you can include CoffeeScript and SCSS like you normally would
with a Rails app. The [Rails
Guide](http://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html) on the asset pipeline
is a great read for this if you haven't seen it.

For more static pages, you just need to drop different markdown files into
`app/views/pages`, and High Voltage will render them as normal at
`/pages/:yourpage`, like so:

    echo "Fire in the" > app/views/pages/disco.html.md
    open http://localhost:3000/pages/disco

I've put a [repo up on GitHub](http://github.com/qrush/danger_danger) if you
want to check out a working version of this.

## Don't you want to know how we keep starting fires

Ok sure, this is a lot of setup for a static site. The idea is that eventually I
want to be using Rails anyway, so why not just use it to start?  If I end up
creating another one of these, I may end up making a [Rails
Template](http://www.railsinside.com/tips/212-rails-templates-pumped-full-of-caffeine.html),
which makes the legwork of setting this kind of Rails app up way easier. For
now, this works great, and I hope it helps you out too!