getting_started.step

img src: "img/Start_page.png", alt: "Screenshot of a Ruby on Rails default home page"

goals do
  goal "Create Your New Application"
message "Let's get started! By the end of this step, we'll have a brand-spankin'-new (empty) Rails app."
end

steps do

  tip "If you have any problems, call over a TA."

  step do
    insert 'switch_to_home_directory'
  end

  step do
    console "mkdir railsbridge"
    message "This command creates a new directory for us to store our project in."
  end

  step do
    console "cd railsbridge"
  end

  step do
    message "Check to see if you have any existing suggestotron apps from a previous workshop."
    option_half "OSX/Linux" do
      console "ls"
      message "`ls` stands for **l**i**s**t."
      message "It lists the contents of the current directory."
      message "If you have any old suggestotron apps in that list, you can remove them to prevent hiccups:"
      console "rm -rf suggestotron"
    end
    option_half "Windows" do
      console "dir"
      message "`dir` stands for **dir**ectory."
      message "It lists the contents of the current directory."
      message "If you have any old suggestotron apps in that list, you can remove them to prevent hiccups:"
      console "rmdir /s /q suggestotron"
    end
  end

  step do
    console "rails new suggestotron"
    message "`rails new` creates a new Rails project with the name you give."
    message "In this case we told it to create a new project called `suggestotron`. We'll go into detail on what it created shortly."
    message "This will print a lot of stuff to the screen and can take a while to finish."
  end

  step do
    console "cd suggestotron"
    message "`cd suggestotron` makes suggestotron our current directory."
  end

  step do
    message <<-MARKDOWN
Open the suggestotron folder as a project in your text editor.
  MARKDOWN

  tip "Close any files that are already open. They might be from yesterday's `test_app`, and we want to make sure that we're editing files in today's `suggestotron` app."

  message <<-MARKDOWN
In **VS Code**, you can use the `File > Open > Folder...` menu option.

Select your `suggestotron` folder from the file picker that opens. If everything works out your editor should show the directories of your app in a tree structure on the left:

![Screenshot of Suggestotron project folder tree in VS Code](img/vscode_project_as_folder.png)
    MARKDOWN
  end

  message <<-MARKDOWN
  You can see that <code>rails new</code> created a lot directories and
  files. The ones we want to focus on today are:
  MARKDOWN

  table border: "1", cellspacing: "0", cellpadding: "3", align: "center" do
    tr {
      th "File/Folder"
      th "Purpose"
    }
    tr {
      td "app/"
      td "Contains the controllers, models, and views for your application.  You will do most of your work here."
    }
    tr {
      td "config/"
      td "Configure your application's runtime rules, routes, database, and more."
    }
    tr {
      td "db/"
      td "Shows your current database schema, as well as the database migrations."
    }
    tr {
      td "public/"
      td "The only folder seen to the world as-is. If you put files in here, they will be served directly without any processing by Rails."
    }
    tr {
      td "app/assets/"
      td "This is where your images, JavaScript, stylesheets (CSS), and other static files should go. Modern Rails apps use something called the Assets Pipeline, which combines all the JavaScript and CSS files in this directory into a single file for speediness."
    }
  end

  message "There is a lot more that `rails new` created. Probably enough to fill a book, so we're going to ignore them for now."
end

next_step "add_the_project_to_a_git_repo"