One of the things that is offputting about learning any of the web application stacks that I have tried (rails, turbogears, django) is the command line operations that need to be performed. When you start using them they seem like magic but after a while they become old friends. Hence this article is a summary of the rails command line operations that I use routinely.
All these commands except for the first one should be executed in the root directory of your application. Note that for the commands that start 'script' you are running ruby scripts and under windows you will need to type 'ruby script/blah'.
rails {app name}
The basic one, creates a new rails application. It will create a subdirectory with the given name in the current directory. This subdirectory is the root directory of your application and will be filled with all the appropriate files and subdirectories to start developing. It is a big code generator.
script/server
This could be considered the next step after creating your application. You cd to the application's root directory and run this command. It will start a development web server and you will be able to connect to localhost:3000 in a web browser and admire your new creation. This is the way to debug your application. Any print statements will be dumped out here.
script/generate model {model name}
This command will generate a new model in your application. A model is roughly equivalent to a table in the database.
script/generate controller {controller name}
This command will generate a new controller in your application in the file 'app/controllers/{controller name}_controller.rb'. A controller is essentially the logic that takes a web page request and decides what to do with it. It will also create a directory called 'app/views/{controller name}' to store the views for this controller, views being the templates that determine how the web pages will look.
rake db:migrate
This runs the migrations that will either define the database schema, modify it or undo those modifications. It defaults to updating the development database but can take the argument 'RAILS_ENV=production' to update the production database.
script/console
script/console is useful for debugging. It gives you a ruby irb command line prompt where you can play with the inner workings of your code, primarily you have direct access to your models and hence the database. It can be an easier way of manipulating the database from a command line than typing SQL into the mysql or sqlite command line clients.
rake --tasks
Lists what rake tasks are available.
rake db:test:prepare
Prepares the test database for running unit tests.
rake test
Runs all unit, functional and integration tests on your model.
I think that covers it. There are many more options than these are the ones that I have found to be most useful.
Peter's Moblog
