Ruby on Rails

After months of learning about Ruby, HTTP requests, Active Record, and more, I finally arrived to the Ruby on Rails portion at Flatiron School a few weeks ago. What an adventure it has been. All that hard work and now I am learning about all the magic this framework has to offer (not to mention the abundance of resources across the web). I know there are haters out there who say it is dying/dead, but it has so much to offer in so many different areas. I feel like the more I follow the Rails path, the better I get at creating software not just programming.

The Project

We were tasked with creating a simple CRUD web application with a solid back-end. Very similar to our Sinatra project with a few more requirements and a lot more magic (I still can't get over the magical built-in helpers of this framework). I decided to build a project/issue tracker where users can create projects, submit issues, and assign tasks to themeselves. Fix And Forge was born. I know... I have this cliche affinity for alliteration.

Generating Everything

Creating a new Rails application is as easy as:

rails new application-name

And once you're in your new application's root directory you can generate just about whatever you want with:

rails g resource
rails g migration
rails g model

These commands take a number of arguments and options and inform you what was done. It is awesome and I can't get over all the work devs have put into making Rails development so smooth, consistent, and even fun.

A Few Hiccups

As I was working on my models, controllers, views, partials, and helpers I ran into a number of gotcha's. Here are a few of them:

• In a belongs_to migration put user_id not just user
• Make sure to include local: true in your list of arguments to form_with
• A form within a nested route needs to have the url: path specified
• If you want to take advantage of your has_many through relationships make sure you also have the has_many relationship with the model you are going through.

JS

Rails has been an absolute blast and I still have so much to learn. I'm excited to continue practicing and learning Rails as we move on to JavaScript and the front-end!