Rails Application from scratch

Generating Rails apps is cool. Really cool. It’s push-button web application development.

Yet, push-button development is black box. Sure, running rails generate scaffold Foobar writes a lot of code… but what does it all mean? Do you know?

Updated June 8, 2011: This article scheduled to be updated for Rails 3.1

I decided to find out for myself…

In search of enlightenment, I’ve constructed, from scratch, what I currently believe is the smallest Rails application possible. This is a worthy exercise, and I’m going to detail every step below.

Ok, this isn’t totally from scratch, as we’re going to use Rails to generate the basic application. We’re just not going to generate any views, controllers, models, or any of that other hooha.

Let’s get started.

1. Setting up the Scratch App

You know the drill:

$ rails new scratch
.
.
.
create  app/controllers/application_controller.rb
create  app/helpers/application_helper.rb
create  app/mailers
create  app/models
create  app/views/layouts/application.html.erb
.
.
.

I’m not showing a long list of other actions performed by Rails. Those actions are necessary (mostly) but not germane to our discussion here.

Once we have our initial Rails application, let’s get the Gemfile squared away.

source 'http://rubygems.org'

gem 'rails', '3.0.0'
gem 'sqlite3-ruby', :require => 'sqlite3'

group :development do
  gem 'rspec-rails', '2.1.0'
end

group :test do
  gem 'rspec', '2.1.0'
  gem 'rspec-rails', '2.1.0'
  gem 'webrat', '0.7.1'
end

Now run bundler:

 $ bundle install

Get rid of the index.html file:

rm public/index.html

Now you should be able to start the server:

 $ rails s

and get a routing error:

No route matches "/"

Makes sense. We don’t even have a web page there.

2. Create a Home page

Let’s create a web page. We’ll start with a Home page, created as a view because we understand web pages really well (controllers, not so much).

 $ mkdir app/views/pages
 $ vi apps/view/pages/home.html.erb

You can add anything you want to this page. I just wrote a single line:

<p>Welcome to your Home Page from Scratch.</p>

Are we there yet?

No. Rails has no way of knowing where to send our request. We need to add a routing directive.

3. Route your request

Now we need to route to it:

 $ vi config/routes.rb

add the line

root :to => 'pages#home'

Testing this out results in another rendering error:

uninitialized constant PagesController

Ok, now we’re striking into the core of Rails. We need a controller.

4. Add a Pages controller

This turns out to be very simple:

 $ vi app/controllers/pages_controller.rb

As it turns out, we don’t need very much code in the controller:

class PagesController < ApplicationController
end

Success! Our page serves.

But we're not done yet, we need to test it.

5. Testing Scratch

Recall adding rspec to the Gemfile. Let's get rspec installed and write a test:

 $ rails generate rspec:install

So we used generate... it turns out we need a file called spec_helper.rb and using generate is the fastest way to get that file.

Here's what's in pages_controller_spec.rb:

require 'spec_helper'

describe PagesController do
  render_views
  describe "GET 'home'" do
    it "should have the word 'Scratch'" do
      get :home
      response.should have_selector("p", :content => "Scratch")
    end
  end
end

Let's run it:

$ rspec spec
.

Finished in 0.04513 seconds
1 example, 0 failures
$ 

And that's it. The smallest Rails app possible.

Or at least the smallest Rails App I know how to write.

Making scratch smaller

Here's a number of things to investigate:

• Remove the database completely. It's not needed, but the current configuration barfs without having the SQLite gem bundled. Here are some links for removing database dependency:
  • http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1098933/activerecord-dependency-with-ruby-rails-cucumber-rspec
  • http://log4p.com/2007/12/04/using-rails-without-a-database/
• Get rid of other directories which are totally unnecessary, the Javascript directory, for example. Possible others such as test. Good project to remove these one-at-a-time and see what happens.
• Build the rails code from scratch instead of using rails new. Could be fun to try.

More resources

One of the coolest things about Rails is how easy it is to build a template application to help get yourself bootstrapped. Here are a few resources to help get you started:

• Rails with Omniauth and Mongoid
• Fast Rails starter templates with Devise

Let's hear it from readers: how would you suggest making this code smaller?

Update: After reading just a few pages into RSpec, it occurred to me this development cycle is incorrect. Or at least not state of the art. What did I do wrong?