Rebrand & customize

If you're here, you should have been able to complete the quickstart and you should have your RailsFast base project already deployed and live. That's huge! You have a live, secure, monetizable demo page that screams "build on me!", so let's get to it!

It's time to own your app. Let's start by customizing the base project to make it truly yours.

Rebrand the project

Customizing your brand name, logo, company name etc. in RailsFast is extremely straightforward: you just need to edit the railsfast.yml under config/railsfast/railsfast.yml.

Since you already have a name and domain name, go ahead and edit the file. While you're at it, you can also add your project logo, your default page title and description for SEO, and your legal address for invoicing.

TIP

While you're setting branding materials, don't forget to add a default OG image on railsfast.yml. An OG image is the image showed on apps like X, Telegram, Discord, Facebook, etc when you share a link. They're usually 1200x630px. OG images are notoriously important for CTR and looking professional when people share your project.

When you're done, you can update the live website by first git commiting your changes, and then deploying the project with:

kamal deploy

And if you just want to see the changes in your computer without updating the live website, just fire up the local development server:

bin/dev

And your project will be available in your computer only at http://localhost:3000

Add a favicon

While we're at it, there's one last thing we can do to make your RailsFast project professional-looking and properly branded: add a favicon. The favicon is the little icon that shows up in the browser navbar next to your website title, and in mobile browsers when you save the page as a bookmark, browse tabs, etc.

If you already have a logo for your project, this should be quite straightforward. I recommend you use a favicon generator like this one, because it already gives you not only the favicon, but the mobile iOS / Android app icons, and icons in different sizes, all RailsFast-compatible. Just generate your favicon pack and replace the contents of public/favicon in your RailsFast project with your own generated assets.