Creating a New Application

When you install the Rails framework, you also get a new command-line tool, rails, that’s used to construct each new Rails application you write.

Why do we need a tool to do this? Why can’t we just hack away in our favorite editor and create the source for our application from scratch? Well, we could just hack. After all, a Rails application is just Ruby source code. But Rails also does a lot of magic behind the curtain to get our applications to work with a minimum of explicit configuration. To get this magic to work, Rails needs to find all the various components of your application. As you’ll see later (in Where Things Go), this means we need to create a specific directory structure, slotting the code we write ...

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