Sign Up

Now that we have a working User model, it’s time to add an ability few websites can live without: letting users sign up for the site. We’ll use an HTML form to submit user signup information to our application in Section 7.2, which will then be used to create a new user and save its attributes to the database in Section 7.4. At the end of the signup process, it’s important to render a profile page with the newly created user’s information, so we’ll begin by making a page for showing users, which will serve as the first step toward implementing the REST architecture for users (Section 2.2.2). As usual, we’ll write tests as we develop, extending the theme of using RSpec and Capybara to write succinct and expressive integration tests

               In order to make a user profile page, we need to have a user in the database, which introduces a chicken-and-egg problem: How can the site have a user before there is a working signup page? Happily, this problem has already been solved: In Section 6.3.5, we created a User record by hand using the Rails console. If you skipped that section, you should go there now and complete it before proceeding.

If you’re following along with version control, make a topic branch as usual:

 Showing Users

In this section, we’ll take the first steps toward the final profile by making a page to display a user’s name and profile photo, as indicated by the mockup in Figure 7.1.1 Our

eventual goal for the user profile pages is to show the user’s profile image, basic user data, and a list of microposts, as mocked up in Figure 7.2.2 (Figure 7.2 has our first example of lorem ipsum text, which has a fascinating story that you should definitely read about some time.) We’ll complete this task, and with it the sample application, in Chapter 11.