Creating Your New Application
Goal:
Let's get started! By the end of this step, we'll have a brand-spankin'-new (empty) rails app.
Steps:
Open up a terminal window and try out the following.
$ mkdir railsbridge
$ cd railsbridge
$ rails new suggestotron
$ cd suggestotron
$ ls
If you have any problems, contact a TA immediately.
What Just Happened?
- 'mkdir' stands for make directory (folder).
- We've made a folder called railsbridge
- 'cd' stands for change directory.
- 'cd railsbridge' makes railsbridge our current directory.
- 'rails new' creates a new rails project with the name you give.
- In this case we told it to create a new project called suggestotron.
- We'll go into detail on what it created shortly.
- 'ls' stands for "list (stuff)".
- It shows you the contents of the current folder.
You can see that rails new created a lot directors and
files. The ones we want to focus on today are:
| File/Folder | Purpose |
|---|---|
| app/ | Contains the controllers, models, and views for your application. You will do most of your work here. |
| config/ | Configure your application’s runtime rules, routes, database, and more. |
| db/ | Shows your current database schema, as well as the database migrations. |
| public/ | The only folder seen to the world as-is. This is where your images, JavaScript, stylesheets (CSS), and other static files go |
There is a lot more that rails new created. Probably enough to fill
a book, so we're going to ignore them for now.