TODO App

A Ruby on Rails application to keep track of TODO items. Created in RailsSchool. See http://www.railsschool.org/l/todo-create-your-first-ruby-on-rails-app for more information, including the lesson whiteboard.

Course Outline

1. Create a new nitrous.io environment - If you've followed the FAQ and created a local development environment, this works too, but we've found beginners are more comfortable using nitrous.io

2. Go over what we want to do - create an application to track To Do items (how meta...)

3. Create a new rails app in the console (It's that space on the bottom that ends in a $, so we'll use a $ to indicate commands that you should run in the console)

    $ rails new todos_app
   

4. Change Directory to the newly created todos_app directory

    $ cd todos_app
   

5. Use rails built-in scaffolds to add the idea of a to do that we can check off

    $ rails generate scaffold todo title:string description:text is_complete:boolean
   

6. This scaffolding created a database migration that needs to be run, so run it with

    $ rake db:migrate
   

7. Launch the rails server

    $ rails server
   

8. Preview the application by clicking on Preview → Port 3000

9. You should see the default welcome to rails screen. Browse to /todos to see the todo scaffold.

10. We want the todos scaffold to be our root page, so in the editor, open config/routes.rb and add following line inside the do...end block:

    root 'todos#index'
    

11. Browse to the root page (or click Preview → Port 3000 again) and play around. Notice that we didn't have to restart our rails server.

Extra

We had some time left over, so we decided to add another field to our Todo model in order to keep track of when we want to accomplish our todo items.

1. add new field to track when the todo item is due (note: you can create a new console tab for this, just remember to cd todos_app):

    $ rails generate migration add_due_at_to_todos due_at:datetime
    $ rake db:migrate
   

2. Enter the console to set the due_at fields for some existing todos:

    $ rails console
    > t = Todo.find(1)
    > t.due_at = "2014-09-05"
    > t.save!
    > t = Todo.find(2)
    > t.due_at = 5.days.from_now
    > t.save!
   

3. Edit app/views/todos/index.html.erb to show the due_at field:

4. edit app/views/todos/_form.html.erb to add the due_at field to our form

    <div class="field">
      <%= f.label :due_at %><br>
      <%= f.date_select :due_at %>
    </div>
   

5. tell the controller to allow the due_at field in the params

    def todo_params
      params.require(:todo).permit(:title, :description, :is_completed, :due_at)
    end
   

Tips & Tricks

• While we can make changes to config/routes.rb or the files in app/ without having to restart the rails server, if you want to restart it, in the console, press Ctrl+c (while holding down the CTRL key, press the C key) to quit out of the running server, and then press the up arrow (or retype rails server) and hit enter to relaunch the server.

• rails s works as shorthand for rails server

• rails g works as shorthand for rails generate

• When in the console, you don't have to type out full names of files and directories. Just start typing and then hit the TAB key to autocomplete. This is known as Tab Completion. For example $ cd tod[TAB] will autocomplete to $ cd todo_app if you're in a new console.

• When in the rails console, if you change a file in app/, type reload! to grab those changes so you don't have to restart the rails console.