I had not seen raygun, but it is essentially the same as our approach: make an app and then clone it. My app.rake is approximately the same as the executable i

I had not seen raygun, but it is essentially the same as our approach: make an app and then clone it. My app.rake is approximately the same as the executable in raygun: https://github.com/carbonfive/raygun/blob/master/bin/raygun https://github.com/carbonfive/raygun/blob/master/bin/raygun In fact this command is almost exactly the same raygun: shell "find . -type f -print | xargs #{sed_i} 's/#{proto_name}/#{new_name}/g'" app.rake: grep -rl #{find} #{directory} | xargs sed -i '' 's/#{find}/#{replace}/g' I think this approach works for us and Carbon Five because we've picked one type of stack and go with that. As to maintenance, I tend to add/test new platform features in the template app and use that as an example to how to upgrade the existing ones. If you do that and update all the gems in the process, it tends to stay up to date.