/rails-playground

Getting Rails set up and using it to create a basic web application

Primary LanguageRuby

Getting Rails 5 up-and-running on c9.io (or any Ubuntu system)

A short checklist borrowed from this blog post:

Installing Rails 5 and RVM

Simply run the following commands in order:

  1. sudo apt-get update - updates Ubuntu packages to latest version so you don't install out-of-date versions
  2. sudo apt-get install curl - installs the cURL utility that is used to send HTTP requests (like in the next command)
  3. \curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --ruby - downloads and installs RVM (Ruby Version Manager)
  4. rvmsudo rvm get stable --autolibs=enable - RVM updates itself to the most recent stable version
  5. rvm reload - Reload RVM so it's using the latest version that was just installed
  6. rvm --default use ruby-2.3.0 - tells RVM to use Ruby 2.3.0 (for Rails 5)
  7. gem update --system - updates gem (the Ruby package manager)
  8. gem install rails --pre - installs the most recent stable Rails version
  9. rails -v - checks the Rails version. It should be 5

If all of the above worked and rails -v is giving the correct output, you can move on.

Creating and running a Rails app

This is a bit trickier, but nothing extremely difficult.

  1. rails new my_app_name -d postgresql - generates a new Rails application (folders, files, etc.) with the name my_app_name, using PostgreSQL database

  2. sudo service postgresql start - Start PostgreSQL so that Rails can use it

  3. rake db:create - creates the PostgreSQL database

    Oh no, an error:

     PG::InvalidParameterValue: ERROR:  new encoding (UTF8) is incompatible
 with the encoding of the template database (SQL_ASCII)

    What a pain in the ass. Basically the template for PostgreSQL databases is encoded as SQL_ASCII, but Rails wants to create the database in UTF-8 encoding because of this line in config/database.yml:

    encoding: unicode

    Rails is right, PostgreSQL should have its default encoding as UTF-8. ASCII makes no sense. Whatever.

    To fix it, download this script and execute it (you may need to run chmod 777 on it) The script will simply set the default encoding for the database template used by Rails to UTF-8 isntead of SQL_ASCII. You should see this output:

     UPDATE 1
 DROP DATABASE
 CREATE DATABASE
 UPDATE 1
 VACUUM
 UPDATE 1

    To verify that this worked, check PostgreSQL directly:

    • sudo sudo -u postgres psql to launch the PostgreSQL console
    • \list to list any existing databases

    You should see this line: template1 | postgres | UTF8 | C | C |; Rails will use template1 when creating databases, so as long as the encoding is UTF-8, everything will be fine.

    • Re-run rake db:create; the command should no longer throw an exception
    • Re-run \list in the PostgreSQL console to list databases.

    You should now see the database for your rails app: my_app_name_development | ubuntu | UTF8 | C | C |. Use \q to quit the console.

  4. Navigate to the app's Cloud9 URL, e.g. https://rails-playground-cireficc.c9users.io.

    • You should see a beautiful picture of happy people with a welcome message:

    "Yay! You're on Rails!"

If you got this far, then you've successfully set up Rails and are now ready to start playing around!

Here are some useful sites containing tutorials: