Welcome to the first week of Rails Development. In this unit, we will:
- Meet in our first mentor sessions
- Verify setups in Cloud9 or a local environment
- Begin learning Rails basics
Everyone who is continuing onto the Rails section of the course should have received an invitation for a Treehouse account. Be sure you have accepted that invitation and logged into Treehouse.
To start, let’s make sure that we’re all ready to program in Rails. We recommend that you set up your personal computer for development, so that you do not have to continue to use Cloud9. However, not everyone has a machine that will support Rails development, so you may continue to use Cloud9 as necessary. Some of you may have problems with the setup, and we’ll try to help you through it, but until you have completed the setup you can use Cloud9. You can start your development on Cloud9 and switch to local development easily: You just clone the git repository to which you have stored your work onto your local machine.
You can configure your machine for Rails development if you have any of:
- A Mac with OSX
- Ubuntu Linux
- A WIndows 10 64bit machine with at least 8G of memory
In each case, you need at least 3G of free disk space — more like 6G if using WIndows 64. Again, if you don’t have one of these kinds of machines, you can use Cloud9.
We have provided some information here as to how to do this in these slides: Getting Started Slides . For Windows users only, there is also this video: Win64 Rails Development . For Linux and Mac users, there are videos in Treehouse that help with the setup. Even if you are using Cloud9, take a look at the slides, make sure you have the “You’re On Rails” screen working for the blog application as described in the slides, and make sure that you have stored the start of that application in github.
Rails Basics
Now you’re ready to start Ruby on Rails. We will be working out of this short track: https://teamtreehouse.com/tracks/back-end-2-rails . We will add to this track as needed. As you watch the videos in this track, you will see the instructor develop an application called blog. As you watch the video, each time the instructor makes a change or addition to the application, PAUSE the video and DUPLICATE the same steps for your blog application, so you have a version of the application that matches what the instructor is doing. Sometimes the instructor will show several ways to do this. The best practice is DO NOT ERASE. Comment out the lines he is changing, and then make the changes the instructor describes. That way you’ll remember the different ways you can do things.
For the week ending April 10 the tasks are:
- Complete your machine setup, unless using Cloud9.
- Make sure the Rails screen for the application comes up in your browser.
- Store the application in a github repository. You will push your changes periodically during the course.
- Complete Ruby on Rails 5 Basics.
That’s it for this week! Remember to attend at least one mentor session this week and post your scrum update at the end of the week.