First Ruby on Rails project on Mac OS XEdit

Created , updated

These notes were made while trying to put together my first ever Rails project. I recorded the steps taken so that it would be easier for me to repeat them in the future. I later expanded and improved upon these notes in "Rails application bootstrapping", and then went on to refine them further in "Behaviour-Driven Development with Rails".

Basic setup

  1. Install and run Locomotive.
  2. Choose "Create New…" from the Locomotive "File" menu.
  3. Choose "Edit in TextMate" from the "File" menu.
  4. In the Terminal, change to your Rails project’s application root.
  5. Run command `locomotive bash-environment` to enable command line manipulation.
  6. Set up your initial databases as described in "Using SQLite for Ruby on Rails development on Mac OS X Tiger"; skip over the "Manual database creation" step.

Creating your database files

  1. Create initial databases and an empty schema
rake db_schema_dump

This will occur in the default (development) environment. Repeat for the other environments and then restore the RAILS_ENV to its original value.

export RAILS_ENV=production
rake db_schema_dump
export RAILS_ENV=test
rake db_schema_dump
export RAILS_ENV=development

Alternatively using the env command:

env RAILS_ENV=production rake db_schema_dump
env RAILS_ENV=test rake db_schema_dump
env RAILS_ENV=development rake db_schema_dump
  1. Creating your first table:

One way of doing this:

script/generate model wikis

This command actually creates the first migration file in db/migrate.

From:

class CreateWikis < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    create_table :wikis do |t|
      [/tags/t.column #t.column] :name, :string
    end
  end

  def self.down
    drop_table :wikis
  end
end

To:

class CreateWikis < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    create_table :wikis do |table|
      table.column :name, :string
    end
  end

  def self.down
    drop_table :wikis
  end
end

rake migrate

Adding columns to a table:

script/generate migration weblogs

class Weblogs < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
  end

  def self.down
  end
end

class Weblogs < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    create_table :weblogs do |table|
      table.column :name, :string
    end
  end

  def self.down
    drop_table :weblogs
  end
end

rake migrate

Keeping db/schema.rb automatically in sync during migrations

In the file, config/environment.rb, change:

  # Use SQL instead of Active Record's schema dumper when creating the test database.
  # This is necessary if your schema can't be completely dumped by the schema dumper,
  # like if you have constraints or database-specific column types
  # config.active_record.schema_format = :sql

To:

  # Use SQL instead of Active Record's schema dumper when creating the test database.
  # This is necessary if your schema can't be completely dumped by the schema dumper,
  # like if you have constraints or database-specific column types
  config.active_record.schema_format = :ruby

Adding a column to an existing table

script/generate migration add_creation_date_to_weblogs

class AddCreationDateToWeblogs < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    add_column "weblogs", "created", :datetime
  end

  def self.down
    remove_column "weblogs", "created"
  end
end

rake migrate

The main controller

script/generate controller main welcome

In config/routes.rb

map.connect '', :controller => 'main', :action => 'welcome'

And delete public/index.html

Creating a scaffold

script/generate scaffold weblog

(Accessible at "http://localhost:3000/weblogs/").

Creating a base layout (used site-wide)

Create a file at app/views/layouts/application.rhtml, indicating where included content should go with <%= @content_for_layout %>. For example:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
	"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" version="-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" xml:lang="en">
<head>
	<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
	<title><%= @page_title %></title>
</head>
<body>
<%= @content_for_layout %>
</body>
</html>

See also