The First Application

Virtually all Rails applications start the same way, with the rails command. This handy program creates a skeleton Rails application in a directory of your choice. To get started, make a directory for your Rails projects and then run the rails command to make the first application.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Listing 1.3 Running rails to generate a new application.

As seen at the end of Listing 1.3, running rails automatically runs the bundle install command after the file creation is done. If that step doesn’t work right now, don’t worry; follow the steps in Section 1.2.4 and you should be able to get it to work.

        Notice how many files and directories the rails command creates. This standard directory and file structure (Figure 1.2) is one of the many advantages of Rails; it immediately gets you from zero to a functional (if minimal) application. Moreover, since the structure is common to all Rails apps, you can immediately get your bearings when looking at someone else’s code. A summary of the default Rails files appears in Table 1.1; we’ll learn about most of these files and directories throughout the rest of this book. In particular, starting in Section 5.2.1 we’ll discuss the app/assets directory,