The Rails Development Environment Walk-Thru

Quick reference

• 00:04 In this video, I want to go through all of these directories and files and
• 00:08 explain what all of these things do.
• 00:11 Because right off the bat, man, it looks complicated.
• 00:14 There is just a lot of stuff here and it's very easy to get overwhelmed.
• 00:19 And the good news is we are not going to be using most of this stuff.
• 00:23 In fact you're never going to use most of this stuff,
• 00:25 you can go most of your career without ever touching some of these directories.
• 00:29 And that's a very good thing because, man, there is a lot of stuff here.
• 00:32 So let us just sort of dive right in here.
• 00:34 Let's just start to the top as click the App directory.
• 00:37 And it expands and you see all of these different things.
• 00:40 Now assets, this is where things like images, JavaScript, and stylesheets go.
• 00:45 We'll use that a little bit.
• 00:46 Controller, remember we talked about controllers in the MVC architecture?
• 00:51 This is where your controllers go.
• 00:53 Helpers we probably won't use.
• 00:54 Mailers we probably won't use.
• 00:57 Models we probably won't use.
• 00:59 Views we will definitely use.
• 01:01 This is where your web pages go.
• 01:03 And we'll see that very soon when we start building out web pages.
• 01:07 So that's the app directory, you'll use the app directory quite a bit.
• 01:10 So sort of get used to it.
• 01:11 Be familiar with what's in here.
• 01:13 The bin directory we probably won't ever use.
• 01:16 The config directory we will definitely use.
• 01:19 Let's see we'll use this Routes file and maybe some others.
• 01:24 So you can look at that.
• 01:24 The database, this is where some of your database stuff goes.
• 01:28 We saw that model directory earlier,
• 01:30 there is also some database stuff that goes there.
• 01:32 And the Lib directory we probably won't use.
• 01:35 The Log directory we probably won't use.
• 01:38 Public we won't use, Test we won't use.
• 01:40 Temp we won't use and Vendor we will not use.
• 01:43 So right off the bat we knocked out a whole lot of these that we're
• 01:46 never ever going to use.
• 01:47 And that's a pretty good thing, starting out especially,
• 01:50 because it's really easy to get overwhelmed by this stuff.
• 01:53 And you shouldn't be, because like I said, it's not as bad as it seems.
• 01:58 The app directory we are going to use and the config directory sometimes,
• 02:01 we'll look at the db directory a little bit.
• 02:04 So, there is one more thing I want to look at and that's this Gem file and
• 02:08 we will use this file a lot.
• 02:10 And take a look at this.
• 02:12 You see all these comments.
• 02:13 The first thing I always do is I go through here and
• 02:15 I delete all the comments just to sort of cleanup this file.
• 02:20 And you'll see why in just a second here.
• 02:24 I'm just highlighting and deleting.
• 02:29 Okay.
• 02:32 All right and to save this file, I'm going to hit Ctlr+S on my computer.
• 02:37 If you're on a Mac, it's Cmd+S I believe.
• 02:39 Or we can go up to this File and click Save, it does the same thing.
• 02:43 Now you can see, here's the file right?
• 02:45 If we click on another one of these, like the readme file it pops up right
• 02:48 next to it, and we can tab around between the two.
• 02:51 Now I get in the habit of opening lots of files and so
• 02:54 I'll have like 20 or 30 of these tabs open, it becomes just a nightmare mess.
• 02:59 It's kind of a good idea from time to time to just close out some of these files.
• 03:03 But, the gem file is something we're going to use,
• 03:05 I'll get into that in a little bit later video when we actually start using it.
• 03:09 But, any time you want to add a third party thing to your rails app,
• 03:13 this is why you do that.
• 03:14 You type it right there, and we'll get in all that later, so let's what else.
• 03:18 We got the directory, we got the text editor, this is the terminal,
• 03:22 I'll talk about this in just a minute.
• 03:24 Like I said this is a Linux terminal, we can issue Linux type commands.
• 03:37 And you see we're in the Workspace directory.
• 03:41 In the Workspace directory is this Pinteresting
• 03:44 top level directory right here.
• 03:46 And you can see, here's this Gemfile, that's this Gemfile right there.
• 03:50 This readme file, that's this readme file right here.
• 03:54 This app directory, that's this app directory.
• 03:57 This config directory that's this.
• 03:59 So you can see the two are related.
• 04:01 This is just a visual representation and this is a terminal representation.
• 04:07 So we generally will just use this directory tree.
• 04:10 If we want to open the gem file we just double click it,
• 04:13 we don't come don't come down here and open, type a command to open it.
• 04:16 But you could, so like I said throughout this course we're going to be using this
• 04:19 terminal for basic things you don't need to know Linux in order to use this.
• 04:23 I'll show you all the commands that you need,
• 04:25 it's very simple, very straightforward.
• 04:27 If you're interested in this sort of thing and you want to go out and
• 04:30 learn more about Linux and the terminal and
• 04:32 command prompts, definitely you can go crazy and do that.
• 04:35 But it's not necessary for this course and that's pretty much it.
• 04:38 It's a very simple setup.
• 04:39 We got all of our files and directories on the left.
• 04:42 We got a text editor in the middle and our terminal down here.
• 04:44 And like I said earlier I'll be using this Cloud9 development environment.
• 04:47 You should continue to use the tools that we've downloaded and
• 04:50 installed at the beginning of the course.
• 04:52 Namely the Sublime editor and the Git Bash terminal.
• 04:54 And as you can see they're very similar.
• 04:57 If I want to open a file and C9 and I click it here and it opens.
• 05:00 On the other hand if you're in your Sublime Text,
• 05:02 same deal you just come to the same file and open it in the exact same way.
• 05:06 And down here like if we have a command, pwd for instance.
• 05:11 You do the exact same command in your git bash terminal, just make sure you're in
• 05:16 the c/pinteresting directory always and you should be good to go.
• 05:20 In that way, there is absolutely no difference between these two
• 05:23 different setups.
• 05:24 Like I said, it's just kind of easier to have all the stuff on
• 05:26 the screen while I'm teaching you.
• 05:27 And so that's why we do it.
• 05:28 The only real difference is this, whenever we want to run a project in C9,
• 05:32 you'll see me click this run project button.
• 05:34 But we learned earlier at the beginning of the course, if you want to run your
• 05:38 project you just type in this rails server command or just rails s.
• 05:43 And when you do, the server will boot up, you just copy the address.
• 05:48 Head over to your web browser and paste it in.
• 05:53 And boom, it'll appear just like that.
• 05:54 So pretty simple.
• 05:55 And that's pretty much all there is to it.
• 05:57 So in the next video, I think we're going to start to look at version control.

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.