Rails: Up and Running, 2nd Edition

Preparing Your Project and Database

Before you can do anything, you’ll need a Rails project. Create your project by typing rails photos, and then change into the new directory with cd photos. You’ll see the following output, which we’ve abbreviated; your exact list may be different based on your version of Rails:

$ rails photos
      create  
      create  app/controllers
      create  app/helpers
      create  app/models
...
      create  config/database.yml
      create  config/routes.rb
...

$ cd photos/

If your server is not started, restart it as usual with script/server. Point your browser to http://localhost:3000/ to make sure things are working. You’ll see the Rails welcome page if everything is working correctly.

Let’s take a more detailed look at the files that Rails created with the new project. Notice that Rails created a database configuration file for you called database.yml. As of Rails 2, the default configuration file uses a lightweight database called sqlite3. You can use that database engine or another one, like MySQL. In this book, we’ll use sqlite3. If you decide to use MySQL instead, you would need to install the database engine, and change config/database.yml to match your database configuration, which would look something like this:

development:
  adapter: mysql 
  database: photos_development
  username: root
  password: 
  host: localhost

test:
  adapter: mysql 
  database: photos_development
  username: root
  password: 
  host: localhost

If you choose to use MySQL or change your database.yml file in any way, keep in mind that ...