This post is part of a series
You use several command line tools throughout the blog tutorial, and you'll copy/pasted several commands into the terminal. Here's a bit more explanation on each command.
When you install the Rails gem, you also get the rails command line tool - aptly named… wait for it… rails. At some point, read the full doco.
Here's what we use in the tutorial:
Create a new app
rails new quick_blog -T
This creates a folder called 'quick_blog' in the current directory, with a new rails application inside it. The '-T' option just means we don't include 'Test::Unit' files. Test::Unit is the default unit testing framework for Rails - though most developers prefer to use RSpec instead, which is what we use in this blog.
Start our local webserver
rails server
Or 'rails s' for short. This launches the WEBrick web server, allowing us to access our app through the browser. WEBrick comes bundled with Ruby, making it the easiest webserver to use for our new blog.
Type Control-C to stop the server.
Generate blog post files and migrations
rails g scaffold Post title body:text
Short for rails generate. The rails g command can help us create controllers, views, models, and more.
The option we've gone with - scaffold - creates a full set including a model file, a controller file, view files, some route defenitions, and a database migration file.
After scaffold, we specify the name of our model (Post), along with the name:type pairs we want as fields in our posts database table.
Since we don't specify a type for title, it will use the default type of string.
Lots more info on column types here.
Generate comments model, controller and routes
rails generate resource Comment post:references body:text
We've opted for the longer rails generate option, but it's exactly the same as rails g. We've specified resource this time, rather than scaffold.
resource will generate all the same stuff as scaffold, except it'll leave out the view files. We don't need view files for Comments, because comments aren't viewed in their own right. To view comments, we'll manually add some code to our Post view files.
After resource, we specify the name of our model (Comment), followed by the name:type pairs we want as fields in the comments database table.
Note the post:references pair just says that a Comment should have a post_id foriegn key field.
Full doco here.
Rake helps with common admin tasks, like compiling asses, creating / updating databases, clearing temp data, and more. Most commonly, it's used for handling database migrations.
Update the database based on your migrations files
rake db:migrate
This looks at the files in your db/migrate/ folder, and runs the appropriate migration files to get the database up to date.
Rails auto-maintains the app/db/schema.rb file, where it keeps track of which migration the database is up to.
After running this command, you'll need to restart the rails server (Control-C to stop, rails s to start).
bundle exec
If you're having to prefix your rake commands with bundle exec, see the explanation why here
Several git commands are used in the tutorial, but I won't go over git here. If you're not already familiar with git, you'd best learn it before writing another line of code, in any language!
Tower made a great git cheat sheet.
The heroku command line tool is used to interact with Heroku's server, to put our blog live, and publish changes. I've done a separate post covering the heroku commands. (ToDo - Add link here)