Simple Blog creation using Rails(MVC)

Setting up our Rails app

rails new quick_blog -T

Entering this command into your command prompt will cause Rails to generate a new application and begin to install dependencies for your application. This process may take a few minutes, so you should let it continue. Once it has finished type:

cd quick_blog

To change into the folder where your application is stored. If you look at the contents of this folder you’ll see:

This is the standard structure of a new Rails application. Once you learn this structure it makes working with Rails easier since everything is in a standard place. Next we’ll run this fresh application to check that our Rails install is working properly. Type:

rails server

Open your web-browser and head to: http://localhost:3000 you should see something that looks like:

Now that you’ve created the Rails application you should open this folder using Sublime. Open up Sublime, then open the quick_blog folder that was just generated.

Creating basic functionality

Now we’re ready to get started building an actual blog. In your command prompt press Ctrl-c to stop the Rails server, or open a new command prompt and navigate to your Rails application folder. Then you can use a Rails generator to build some code for you:

rails g scaffold Post title body:text

You’ll be presented with something that looks like:

An important file that was generated was the migration file: db/migrate/20130422001725_create_posts.rb Note that you will have a different set of numbers in yours.

class CreatePosts < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    create_table :posts do |t|
      t.string :title
      t.text :body

      t.timestamps
    end
  end
end

This file is some Ruby code that is a database agnostic way to manage your schema. You can see that this code is to create a table called Posts and to create two columns in this table, a title column and a body column. Finally we need to instruct Rails to apply this to our database. Type:

rake db:migrate

Once this command has run you can start up your Rails server again with rails server and then navigate tohttp://localhost:3000/posts to see the changes you’ve made to your application.

From here you can play around with your application. Go ahead and create a new blog post.