Monk, the glue framework

Monk is a glue framework for web development in Ruby. It’s truly modular by relying on the best tool for each job. It’s also pretty fast thanks to Rack and Sinatra.

What’s in the package?

The default skeleton will give you a Sinatra application with a structure, which can be tested using Contest, Rack::Test and Webrat. To store things you’ll have Ohm, a persistence layer that talks to Redis. Other niceties included, like a logger, a settings hash and proper reloading for easier development.

But Monk also respects your tastes, and you are encouraged to create your own skeletons (and maybe share them with us). More on Skeletons.

Getting started

Monk makes the following assumptions:

  • You are familiar with Sinatra.
  • You have Git installed.

If you are ready for the rest, start by installing Monk:

$ sudo gem install monk

This will install a tiny binary that will help you bootstrap your applications. Now create your first Monk project:

$ monk init myapp

This command fetches an application structure with Git, along with a list of dependencies.

Note that this is what you get with the default skeleton. You can add other skeletons to your monk configuration and even replace the default one. More.

Next: Project structure