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Introduction to Ruby on Rails
Ruby on Rails, often just referred to as Rails, is a web application framework written in Ruby. It’s a powerful tool that provides developers with the structure for all the code they write. The primary goal of Rails is to simplify the process of building complex websites. Today, we’re going to dive into an introductory tutorial on how to build your first app using this remarkable framework.
Getting Started
The first step in any new project is setting up your development environment. Before you can start coding, you’ll need to install both Ruby and Rails on your computer. There are plenty of detailed guides online that can walk you through this process step by step.
Creating a New Rails Application
Once you have installed Ruby and Rails, open your terminal or command prompt and navigate to the directory where you want your application to reside. Then type rails new my_first_app. This command will create a new directory named “my_first_app” with a number of files and folders that make up the skeleton of a Rails application.
Understanding MVC Architecture
Rails uses an architectural pattern called Model-View-Controller (MVC). In simple terms, Models handle data and business logic, Controllers receive browser requests and return responses, and Views are templates that get filled with data from controllers which then gets rendered into HTML.
Models
A model represents the information (data) of the application and the rules to manipulate that data. For instance, if our app was a blog site, we might have models for Users, Posts and Comments.
Views
Views are the user interfaces that present models to the user. They’re typically made up of HTML, CSS, and embedded Ruby code.
Controllers
Controllers provide the “glue” between models and views. They process incoming requests from the web browser, interact with the model, and pick the appropriate view to render.
Building Your First App
We’re going to build a simple blog application. This app will have users who can create posts and comment on those posts.
Creating The User Model
To create our User model, we can use Rails’ built-in generator by typing rails generate model User name:string email:string password_digest:string. This command creates a new file in your app/models directory named user.rb that’s ready for you to fill in with relationships and validations for our User model.
Migrating The Database
After creating a new model, you need to tell your database about it. This is where Rails’ migrations come into play. Running rake db:migrate will create a new table in your database called users with columns for name, email, and password_digest.
Setting Up Routes And Controllers
The next step is setting up routes and controllers for our Users resource. In Rails, this is as simple as adding resources :users to your config/routes.rb file and running rails generate controller Users.
Crafting Views For Our Users Resource
The last part of building our blog application is creating views for our Users resource. This involves crafting templates for each action defined in our UsersController (index, show, new, edit). These templates will be filled in with form fields for creating and editing users, as well as displaying a list of all users and individual user profiles.
Conclusion
Ruby on Rails is a powerful tool that can make web development easier and more enjoyable. With its emphasis on convention over configuration, it allows developers to focus more on the unique aspects of their application rather than boilerplate code. This tutorial only scratches the surface of what’s possible with Rails. I encourage you to explore further and see what you can build!
