Learn Ruby on Rails by Creating a Friends List App

Ruby on Rails has long been a popular choice for web developers looking to quickly build powerful web applications. As a batteries-included framework, Rails provides a solid structure for creating web pages, APIs, and databases out-of-the-box. Developers praise Rails for its convention-over-configuration approach and the productivity boost it provides.

In this tutorial, we‘ll learn the essentials of Ruby on Rails by building a practical Friends List application from scratch. The app will allow users to keep track of their friends‘ details – names, email addresses, phone numbers, and so on. We‘ll be implementing all four parts of the CRUD functionality – Create, Read, Update, and Delete. By the end, you‘ll have a solid understanding of what goes into a Rails app and how the pieces fit together.

Let‘s break down the key topics we‘ll be covering:

Introduction and Installation

First things first – we need to have a Ruby environment set up and the Rails gem installed. The latest versions as of this writing are Ruby 3.0.2 and Rails 6.1.4. We‘ll go through the steps to get everything installed on macOS, Linux, and Windows.

First Webpage and MVC Overview

With the environment ready, we‘ll create a new Rails project for our Friends List app and get it running locally. This is a good time to introduce the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture that Rails follows. We‘ll create our first webpage and understand how routes, controllers, views, and models work together in Rails.

Application Partials, Links and New Pages

As our app grows, we‘ll want to keep our code DRY (Don‘t Repeat Yourself). Partials are a great way to extract common view code into reusable components. We‘ll also set up links between pages and create new pages to flesh out the app.

CRUD Scaffold

Here‘s where we get to the meat of the app. We‘ll use Rails scaffolds to quickly generate the code for our Friends model, complete with all the CRUD operations. We‘ll learn how to work with database migrations, models, controllers, routes, and views for the Friends resource.

Styling with Bootstrap

While functionality is important, we also want our app to look good. We‘ll bring in the Bootstrap CSS framework to style our pages and components. Rails has great support for integrating Bootstrap, and we‘ll see how to customize it to our needs.

Devise for Authentication

Most real-world apps have some concept of users and authentication. We‘ll add this to our Friends List using the popular Devise gem. Devise handles all the heavy lifting around user sign up, login, passwords, etc. We‘ll also see how to style the Devise views to match the rest of our app.

Associations

Currently our app has a single Friends model, but we can make it more useful by adding an associated User model. We‘ll set up a one-to-many relationship where each Friend belongs to a User. This will let us scope friends to individual users of the app.

Fun With the Controller

Controllers are the glue between models and views in Rails. We‘ll dive deeper into controllers and see how to add custom actions. This will give us a chance to play with routes, params, and rendering views outside of the standard CRUD operations.

Deploying to Heroku

Once our app is working well locally, it‘s time to share it with the world! We‘ll walk through the steps to deploy our Friends List to Heroku, a popular platform for hosting Rails apps. We‘ll also see how to set up our app to use a production database and work with environment variables.

By the end of this tutorial, you‘ll have built a fully-functional Ruby on Rails application from the ground up. You‘ll understand the core concepts of Rails development and how to put them into practice. Most importantly, you‘ll be equipped to tackle your own Rails projects with confidence.

Ruby on Rails is a powerful yet beginner-friendly framework for web development. It has a thriving ecosystem with a wealth of open source libraries (gems) and a supportive community. Countless startups and large companies alike have used Rails to build successful web applications.

Learning Rails is a great way to level up your skills as a web developer. It lets you create interactive, data-driven websites without needing to reinvent the wheel. The Rails conventions and generators let you focus on what makes your app unique, not on boilerplate code.

I hope this tutorial has piqued your interest in learning Ruby on Rails! Stay tuned for the step-by-step guides walking through each part of building the Friends List application. If you‘re eager to dive in right away, you can find the complete source code on GitHub.

In the meantime, I recommend setting up your development environment and familiarizing yourself with the Ruby language if you haven‘t already. The official Rails Guides are also a great resource to bookmark.

Happy coding, and welcome to the wonderful world of Ruby on Rails!