Integrate Brunch with Rails

Question

I'm trying to use below Brunch skeleton and integrate with my Rails app:

Sassy Brunch with Ember and CoffeeSoup

Is there a way to do this so I can still use Brunch operations like build and watch seamlessly within the Rails app?

Or would we rather want to have separate Frontend for Brunch and use Rails as RESTful provider?

Answer 1

Developing Brunch application separately from Rails application is in my opinion idiomatic way of developing web apps:

1. Ability to synchronously develop frontend and backend. You can simply use static JSON files on your frontend (served from public/) before Rails app is ready.
2. Ability to make frontend totally independent from backend. There can be many front ends, after all (iOS, for example).
3. Ability to share frontend code as an example implementation of your API-using-app. In many applications (yeah not all) frontend these days is less important than the backend data itself and backend business logic. I see no reason not to provide third-party developers a convenient example app they can base they code on.

Answer 2

Checkout the Breakfast Gem. It integrates Brunch into Rails pretty seamlessly.