There are two ways to get started with a Rails application. You can generate a brand new application from scratch, or you can start with code that someone else has written.
We use the rails new command to generate a new application:
~/code$ rails new myapp
Always start in the ~/code folder when you run this command, and of course you'll probably want something different than myapp but that's what we'll use in this example. A new subfolder named myapp (or whatever you chose) will be created, and inside of that subfolder
will be the skeleton of a brand new web application.
To start working with your new application, change your current directory to be the new subfolder:
Always change your current directory after
rails new.
~/code$ cd myapp
~/code/myapp$
You can now start editing the code by simply opening the ~/code/myapp folder in Atom.
Finally, let's "run" the website by starting the "server":
~/code/myapp$ rails server
Now you can use localhost:3000 in your browser to try out your website as you develop.
IMPORTANT: Press CTRL-C when you want to stop the server.
Sometimes you'll be asked to get a copy of an application that's already
been generated, usually from GitHub. Imagine that we've downloaded the code
for a ride-sharing application named NuLyft and saved it in a folder named
~/code/nulyft. Before we can start working with it, we need to open
our command prompt to that directory, and then run the bundle install command:
~/code$ cd ~/code/nulyft
~/code/nulyft$ bundle install
It may take a couple minutes for the bundle install command to do its work.
If all goes well, you'll see the words "Bundle complete!" near the end.