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Showing posts from January, 2022

Cloning Your App with Git

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Cloning Your App to a New Development Environment     Cloning to a New Dev Env There may come a time when you want to work on your app from another workstation. However, of course, this isn't just a simple case of copying the code to another machine and picking up where you left off! Rails demonstrates various levels of helpfulness in this regard - it will tell you if it simply needs a database migration to work, however if your webpacker assets aren't there then it will provide decidedly little assistance! However, following the list of instructions below will almost certainly get you into a place where you can run your local Rails development server and console, and continue working on your lovely app. Bear in mind that this section will not go into development environment setup, which can be found earlier in this guide here . Firstly, unsurprisingly, we need the codebase on our local machin...
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Troubleshooting Your Apps

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As you go forth into the wide and exciting world of app development, enjoying all the fruitful satisfaction that it contains, you will no doubt encounter issues (bugs) that you just can't get to the bottom from simply looking at your code. Don't feel embarrassed by this, it happens to the best of us - so much so that by default Rails installs a gem to help squash these bugs; aptly named byebug . Let's use a relevant, non-silly example of something that might catch you out. Say you are building a web app to store particularly excellent photos of cats. Your database is populated, your MVC components set up and you try to navigate to one of your lovely pictures on your app but see the following depressingly cat-free page instead: Now, some / most of us will have seen what the problem is immediately here. But for the sake of showing you the basics of byebug, let's pretend we're none the wiser. ...
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[ToDoList] Basic Pages

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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...
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New Rails Apps with Docker Compose

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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 ...
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[ToDoList] Building the App

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The new Generator The Rails Development Server     So we have now learned some theory about Rails and set up our development environment with the required packages and version control prerequisites. I think that’s enough preamble, let’s get developing! The next few sections will involve creating a funky little web app that contains a To-Do list that we can add, remove and edit entries from. We saw a very small snippet of the extensive file structure that Rails uses in the first section. If you thought you’d be constructing the longest mkdir -p command in the observable universe to get all of this set up, you will be pleased to know (as I was) that our first utilisation of Rails magic will be to get Rails to generate all of this for us! Feel free to set up a projects directory on your dev machine, or you can just use your home dir if you’d prefer. Whatever you choose, change into this dir n...
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