Rails Cheatsheet

Here are some commands and processes to follow for working with Rails applications. (Note: all of this is covered in the Rails Guides

Creating a new rails application

rails new NAME

Where NAME is the name of your app. Try to keep the name simple such as Blog or Twitter

Gavin's Rails Template

If you would like to use a Rails template that includes a prettier scaffold output (using Bootstrap) you may edit a file named ~/.railsrc and place this content inside:

--skip-spring
--database postgresql
--skip-turbolinks
--skip-coffee
--skip-action-cable
--template=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tiy-tpa-ruby/rails-template/master/.rails_template.rb

If you are using my template, it will ask you a few questions about using HAML instead of ERB and if you want a git repository created and it pushed to GitHub for you automatically

The template also includes Bootstrap and nicer, bootstrap-capable templates which are friendlier than the Rails default scaffold.

First steps

• After creating your new rails app you must cd NAME to change directory into the rails application folder.
• From here you can atom . to open the project in your editor
• You will want a minimum of TWO terminal tabs running in this directory
  • One will be to run rails server
  • The other will be to run various rails task commands, or other tools such as git
• The first task to do in the directory is:
  • bundle
  • This ensures all the project's gems have been installed
• Then we should create the database(s) required:
  • rails db:create
• Then we can start the rails application
  • rails server

Creating a scaffold for a resource

• When you identify a thing our application manages we can use the Rails scaffold system to generate migrations, models, views, controllers.
• Let's say we are building an app to manage Books. We identify these attributes of a book to track:
  • title
  • author
  • page_count
  • genre
• We could use the rails scaffold generator to create all the files needed:
  • rails generate scaffold book title author page_count:integer genre
• Once we confirm the migration in db/migrate/ looks good we apply it to the database:
  • rails db:migrate

What if we get the scaffold wrong

• If you realize you made an error you can destroy the scaffold and then recreate it.
• However if you have made changes to the controller, model, and view, you will lose any of that work.
• The alternative is to manually update everything
  • Create a migration to add/remove/change the column (see rails migration guide)
  • Add the column to the various views
  • Add the column to the params method at the bottom of the applicable controller

Database seeds

• The db/seeds.rb is a very helpful file for loading sample data, or initial data the application might need
• Update the file and then apply the db/seeds.rb into the database
  • rails db:seed
• If you need to reset the database (dropping all data and table structure) and reapply the seeds
  • rails db:schema:load db:seed

What to do when downloading an existing rails project

• Clone the repository
• cd NAME where NAME is the name of the directory where the repository was cloned
• rails db:create db:schema:load db:seed
• This will:
  • Create the database
  • Load the schema (table structure)
  • Initialize the seeds