Creating the Product Maintenance Application

At the heart of the Depot application is a database. Getting this installed, configured, and tested before proceeding will prevent a lot of headaches. If we’re not certain about what we want, take the defaults and it will go easily. If we know what we want, Rails makes it easy to describe your configuration.

Creating a Rails application

In Creating a New Application, we saw how to create a new Rails application. We will do the same thing here. Go to a command prompt and type “rails new” followed by the name of our project. Here, our project is called “depot.” Make sure we are not inside an existing application directory, and type this:

work> rails new depot

We see a bunch of output scroll by. When it has finished, a new directory, depot, has been created. That’s where we’ll be doing our work:

work> cd depot
depot> ls -p

Creating the database

For this application, we’ll use the open-source SQLite database, which we’ll need if you’re following along with the code. We’ll be using SQLite version 3.

SQLite 3 is the default database for Rails development and was installed along with Rails in Installing Rails. With SQLite 3, no steps are required to create a database, and we have no special user accounts or passwords to deal with. So, now we get to experience one of the benefits of going with the flow (or, convention over configuration, as the Rails folks say).

If ye must use a database server other than SQLite 3, the commands to create the database and grant permissions will be different. You can find some helpful hints in the ...