Static Pages With Rails

The ability to return static HTML files is nice, but it’s not particularly useful for making dynamic web applications. In this section, we’ll take a first step toward making dynamic pages by creating a set of Rails actions, which are a more powerful way to define URIs than static files.8 Rails actions come bundled together inside controllers (the C in MVC from Section 1.2.6), which contain sets of actions related by a common purpose. We got a glimpse of controllers in Chapter 2 and will come to a deeper understanding once we explore the REST architecture more fully (starting in Chapter 6); in essence, a controller is a container for a group of (possibly dynamic) web pages.                       

To get started, recall from Section 1.3.5 that, when using Git, it’s a good practice to do our work on a separate topic branch rather than the master   branch. If you’re using  it for version control, you should run the following command:

      Rails comes with a script for making controllers called generate; all it needs to work its magic is the controller’s name. In order to use generate with RSpec, you need to run the RSpec generator command if you didn’t run it when following the introduction to this chapter:

  Since we’ll be making a controller to handle static pages, we’ll call it the StaticPages controller. We’ll also plan to make actions for a Home page, a Help page, and an About page. The Ggenerate script takes an optional list of actions, so we’ll include two of the initial actions directly on the command line (Listing 3.4).