rails g scaffold...

No, no, no…as nice as it sounds to have a complete rails site in all of its glorious RESTfulness at your fingertips in seconds, you’re not supposed to. Taboo, perhaps? Or does it just generate more files than you’d ever care to even attempt to understand? Only DHH knows (hint: it’s the last one.). We’ve all probably ran ‘rails g scaffold rails-test-site’ just to say, ‘damn, that’s pretty cool’, but to fully understand what the magical Rails does, especially for a beginner, let’s take a step back to….

rails new flatiron-reddit

This command creates your run o’ the mill barebones Rails frame for you to start hacking away at. Where are the migrations, you say?? Here, lets add some:

rails g migration create_posts

Or, wait. Let’s do this instead. You not only get your migration, but you get a model along with it! Totally free!

rails g model Post title content user_id:integer

Title, Content, and User_id behind your boilerplate code rails g model MODELNAME are your migration columns. Since I didn’t define any of them, they default to the string datatype, except for user_id. But you knew that already.

Now, lets stop for a minute. I’m pretty lazy, and I don’t want to build out authentication for my very novel & original Flatiron Reddit site. It’s time consuming, and frankly, I like Devise quite a bit. Devise is a Ruby gem that upon running

rails g devise:install

You get a devise.rb file inside your config/initializers that sets the framework to generate

rails g devise User

Now, wait. What the hell is that? Well, since you asked, its the same as your old favorite, rails g model User, but, with Devise. I know. Fancy. Yet, still, what is this ‘Devise’? And, why do I even care? When you run the above code, Devise generates all the necessary views, controllers, and adds several macros to your new User model that it also just generated. Throw a rails s into your terminal, and watch your login work seamlessly. You did that! Congrats! (If you’re feeling like doing some exploring, type in rake routes or visit your config/routes.rb and see all of the rails/devise magic that single line created for you!)

A forewarning: Devise is some powerful shit. When I first attempted to use Devise, I got very stuck. Mainly, because of all of these fancy macros:

devise :database_authenticatable, :registerable, :recoverable, :rememberable, :trackable, :validatable, :confirmable, :lockable, :timeoutable, :omniauthable

There’s probably a hundred more hidden somewhere that I don’t want to know about right now, but all you need to know is that each of these is generating some helper methods for you to use, such as current_user, and user_signed_in? See more here:

ANYway, we’ve got some models, migrations, and some devise controllers. Sweet. Once you have your migrations looking sleek and sexy, run rake db:migrate and add those associations to your model!

For this project, I wanted to try and re-create in all of its glory, Reddit. I left some obvious things out for right now, including some CSS. Ok, a lot of CSS. And upvotes. Since I’m the only one using this site since it’s currently hosted at localhost:3000, I didn’t feel right giving myself upvotes. It’s a little too narcissistic for someone just getting the handle on Ruby, even though my Flatiron Reddit posts are pretty great.

I did, however, implement a comments section for posts, as well as categories for posts, which is what I want to discuss in brief.

Categories. This was a slight hitch for me, although in retrospect it shouldn’t have been. I wanted to create a nested attribute for categories through posts, so when you create a new post, you can choose from the previous categories or create your own. Easy peasy.

Wonderful, right? Well, what if you select a category and don’t create a new one? You’ve got an empty string you need to deal with so it doesn’t append your categories list now.

Here we’re finding or creating a Category with your ‘Create a new Category!’ string entry. If there’s text in there, it finds it in Category.all, or creates a brand new one.

When you push your found category to self.categories, its recording the id, and when you ask your database, ‘Hey, what are the categories for post 27?’ it grabs all of those kick-ass category id’s you hand plucked and prints ’em. Where? Right here:

So, comments. You can create one for anyone’s post, but, you have to delete them when you destroy your post. I’ll break the fourth wall for a moment: if you call destroy.save on your post, your post instance is destroyed, but you still have your comment wanting to print on your root under that no longer existing post_id. So,

Flatiron Reddit in all of its html glory:

Thanks for reading-