Ruby on Rails® for Microsoft Developers

5.1. Creating a New Rails Application

If you were to create a new ASP.NET application, you would typically reach for Visual Studio or its free counterpart Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition, in order to produce a new ASP.NET website. The solution and project generated would essentially be an almost empty container for the items that you'd add as you developed the application.

With Rails you reach for the command line and invoke the rails command, unless you are using one of the available IDEs that does that behind the scenes for you. Unlike Visual Studio, this command generates several folders and files that act as the skeleton of your application.

NOTE

In Rails there is a lot of magic going on. This improves productivity but can also be intimidating to newcomers. When doing Rails development, always keep a tab open on the official API documentation (http://api.rubyonrails.org) or equivalent sites such as http://apidock.com/rails.

5.1.1. The rails Command

You can use the rails command to create your blog application:

C:\projects> rails blog

This creates a blog directory in the current one (C:\projects in this case) and also prints a list of directories and files that are generated, as shown in Figure 5-1.

Figure 5.1. Figure 5-1

You use cd to step into the blog directory that was just generated by the rails command:

C:\projects> cd blog

The directory structure is shown ...