Community Foundations

Community Foundations is a legacy planner for clients of Community Foundations. Each foundation is an organization whose members build their own giving scenarios — annual plans that divide a total giving budget between ongoing percentage-based recurring grants and one-time fixed-dollar gifts. The app is multi-tenant: every organization is served from its own subdomain (for example arlington.community-foundations.rowhomelabs.com).

Tech stack

• Ruby 4.0.2 / Rails 8.1 (tracks the 8-1-stable branch)
• SQLite via Active Record
• Propshaft asset pipeline, Tailwind CSS
• Hotwire — Turbo + Stimulus, with import maps (no Node build step)
• ReactionView — HTML-aware ERB rendering via the Herb engine
• Solid Queue / Solid Cache / Solid Cable — database-backed jobs, cache, and Action Cable
• Active Storage for organization logo uploads
• Postmark for transactional email in production
• Kamal for Docker-based deployment

Domain concepts

• User — authenticates via password or magic link; can belong to multiple organizations.
• Organization — a community foundation; has a name, website, subdomain, and logo.
• OrganizationMembership — joins a user to an organization with a role (owner, admin, or member). Users may also carry a super_admin flag for system-wide access.
• Scenario — a giving plan owned by a user within an organization; has a name and a total giving amount.
• Allocation — a line item within a scenario (single-table inheritance):
  • Allocation::Ongoing — a percentage-based recurring grant.
  • Allocation::OneTime — a fixed-dollar one-time gift.

Getting started

Prerequisites: Ruby 4.0.2 (see .ruby-version) and libvips for Active Storage image processing.

bin/setup        # install gems, prepare and seed the database, then start the dev server

bin/setup ends by launching bin/dev. To run the server on its own afterwards:

bin/dev          # runs Procfile.dev: Rails server + Tailwind CSS watcher

Useful flags and tasks:

bin/setup --skip-server   # set up without starting the server
bin/setup --reset         # reset the database during setup
bin/rails db:seed         # (re)seed sample data

Seed data

bin/rails db:seed is idempotent and creates the Arlington Community Foundation organization plus one user per role — owner@example.com, admin@example.com, and member@example.com, all with the password password — and two sample scenarios ("Balanced giving" and "Education focus").

Testing

bin/rails test           # unit, model, and controller tests (Minitest)
bin/rails test:system    # browser-based system tests (Capybara)

CI prepares the test database first with bin/rails db:test:prepare.

Code quality & security

These run in CI and can be run locally:

bin/rubocop              # Ruby style linting (rails-omakase)
bin/brakeman             # static analysis for Rails security issues
bin/bundler-audit        # scan gems for known vulnerabilities
bin/importmap audit      # scan JavaScript dependencies for vulnerabilities