Setting Up Your Development Environment
Get familiar with the Rails development environment.
We'll cover the following...
The day-to-day business of writing Rails programs is pretty straightforward. Everyone works differently, but here’s how we work.
The command line
We do a lot of work at the command line. Although an increasing number of GUI tools help generate and manage a Rails application, we find the command line is still the most powerful place to be. It’s worth spending a little while getting familiar with the command line on the operating system. Find out how to use it to edit commands that are being typed, how to search for and edit previous commands, and how to complete the names of files and commands as they’re typed.
Tab completion is standard on Unix shells such as Bash and Zsh. It allows you to type the first few characters of a filename, hit Tab, and have the shell look for and complete the name based on matching files.
Version control
We keep all our work in a version control system (currently Git). We make a point of checking a new Rails project into Git when we create it and committing changes once we’ve passed the tests. We normally commit to the repository several times an hour.
If Git isn’t familiar, don’t worry. This course gives an introduction to the few commands that are needed to follow along with the application being developed. If needed, extensive documentation is available online. ...