将 Rails Gem / Engine 转换为应用程序

Question

The rails engines feature is pretty good, and I have watched the Railcasts and read the Rails documentation on it. I can see how you can access or override all the relevant components in the engine.

However, say I wanted to drastically modify the engine's code, is it possible to convert the engine back into a normal Rails app, and then take it from there. Is there anything else involved other than copying the directories in the gem over an empty application directory?

I am looking at this engine:

https://github.com/ging/social_stream

Answer 1

Yeah you can, just go to https://github.com/rails/rails & hit the fork button to fork the repository to your github account (assuming you already have one setup). Afterwards, clone the forked project to your local machine with:

git clone your_forked_repository_url.git 

If you don't feel the need to fork your own version run:

git clone git://github.com/rails/rails.git

At this point you can make modifications to your heart's content. To use a local copy of the gem in a rails application add the following to your Gemfile (replacing the old rails gem):

gem "rails", :path => "/somewhere/your_rails_project"

All of this and more is highlighted in http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/contributing_to_ruby_on_rails.html