DoodleBlog

Following on from the Docker & docker-compose guides, it is possible to use docker-compose to build a Rails application that uses a PostgreSQL database without even installing Ruby on your local machine by instead using containers ! This becomes a very useful option to have if you work from many different workstations and don't want to ensure they are all equipped with the correct Ruby and Rails dependencies, or if you wish to use a version of Ruby / Rails not supported by your operating system (for example, Ubuntu 20.04 only allows provides up to Ruby 2.7 in its apt cache). In fact, Rails 7 added native support for Docker, such that it generates almost all of the default files we need for us! This comes with its problems and, I won't lie, updating this post to work with Rails 7 (it was previously written for Rails 6) has been a colossal pain and features a bit of hackery. However it is ultimately a good thing, and having ...

Well that was fun. However all we’ve really done is spooked someone called Bob, without actually creating anything remotely resembling a web application. Let’s rectify this and create some pages one would normally find on a website; a Home page and an About page. Home & Away About Helpful Links [Insert Beatles Reference]     Because we already learned a bit about MVC, we know that we will need a controller and at least one view to display these pages (we won’t need to worry about models until we’re handling real data). As before, we’ll need to add a route configuration so Rails knows where to go, too. Rails provides a fair bit of magic to streamline this process in the form of generators . However, because we’re learning, we’re going to do this manually for now and learn what this magic entails, so we can appreciate it more later. We already created a PagesController in the...

Development Environment Packages & Dependencies     Before we can build our app, we need a suitable environment to work in - this will generally take the form of either some kind of virtual machine or using Docker. There are a number of ways we can get this set up depending on your local workstation’s resources and how you prefer to work: One of the easier / less resource intensive options will be to use an online IDE, meaning you won’t have to host anything on your local machine. I quite like https://codeanywhere.com/ , which you can use your Google account to access for free (because you definitely have a Google account, don't you?). Once signed up and on your Dashboard click New Container , give it a name and search for the Ruby stack, select it and hit OK . My overall recommended option for...