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In this document, you will complete the following tasks:

• Create a rails application directory
• Discuss the rails application structure
• Vendor rails to a specific version
• Install rspec and rspec-rails gems
• Configure rspec and rspec-rails gems

REQUIREMENTS

Prerequisite knowledge

This instructional document does not require that you understand Ruby on Rails. However, familiarity with osX or Ubuntu (debian) Linux will be helpful. This document is not designed for use with Windows. This instructional document is designed to be completed from top to bottom. More information can be found on this topic at One-Click Ruby Installer.

CREATE A RAILS APPLICATION DIRECTORY

To start with development, we are required to create a rails application directory. Go ahead and execute the following commands:

$ cd /some/directory/for/your/projects
$ rails starter-project
$ cd starter-project

DISCUSS THE RAILS APPLICATION STRUCTURE

Every rails application contains a standard group of directories and files. You can think of this structure as a skeleton for your application. Now let’s discuss each directory and how it is used.

app

Rails follows the Model, View, Controller (MVC) design pattern for developing applications. This directory holds a controllers, models, and views directory. Helpers is available for reuse of code in the rails views.

config

As the directory states, this is where configurations lie

• Database configurations – database.yml
• Settings for all environments – environment.rb
• environments provides a place for development, testing, and production configurations
• initializers holds files that contain blocks of code run at startup time
• locales holds localization files
• Website Url class mappings – routes.rb

db

• SQLite db files
• Database Migrations (after first migration is generated)

doc

Document directory

lib

User created libraries.

• Tasks includes *.rake files for creating rake commands

log

Log files

public

Html, image, javascript, and stylesheet resources

scripts

Commands to start a web server, generate objects, destroy objects, and more

test

Testing for unit, functional, integration, performance and additionally fixtures

tmp

Temporary directory for pids, sessions, etc

vendor

Plugins, Gems, and specific versions of the rails framework

VENDOR RAILS TO A SPECIFIC VERSION

We can save a copy of the rails gems inside our application. The benefits of doing this are keeping a specific version of gems bundled with the application. This helps in deployment and building a development environment on another computer.

$ rake rails:freeze:gems

INSTALL RSPEC AND RSPEC-RAILS GEMS

We will be using rspec for our testing framework. It provides a language centric way of testing where the code is meant to be readable by developers and well as the business/clients.

To install the framework, we need both the rspec and rspec-rails gems. rspec is a spec testing framework for ruby and rspec-rails offers some helpers for rspec in a rails application.

$ sudo gem install rspec
$ sudo gem install rspec-rails

CONFIGURE RSPEC AND RSPEC-RAILS GEMS

Next we need to tell the application how to reference rspec. To do that, add the following lines inside your config/environment.rb file.


# in config/environments/test.rb
config.gem "rspec", :lib => false, :version => ">= 1.2.0"
config.gem "rspec-rails", :lib => false, :version => ">= 1.2.0"


Now regenerate the rspec files

$ script/generate rspec

Your application is now setup with the rspec library! If you wish to continue in this series, the next article will discuss building your models and schema with migrations.