Set up a new Ruby on Rails project

Article 1 in the Build a blog with Ruby on Rails series.

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1. The rails new command

Let’s omit a few features we might never need.

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rails new xolux \
--name=app \
--database=postgresql \
--edge \
--css=postcss 
--skip-docker --skip-kamal \
--skip-action-mailer --skip-action-mailbox \
--skip-test --skip-system-test \
--skip-ci \

Explanation:

• xolux Use your preferred root folder name
• --name=app We are setting the application name to “App”. This will allow us to copy and paste stuff around in the future. Our Rails apps live in their own servers, so there’s no risk of service name collisions.
• --database=postgresql We are using PostgreSQL in production, so might as well use it in development as well
• --edge Let’s use the latest features in Ruby on Rails 8.0
• --css=postcss Let’s build an awesome PostCSS pipeline so we can cherry-pick our favorite tools [TO DO: Write a CSS guide and link here]
• --skip-docker, --skip-kamal We are deploying to Render via blueprint and so we only need to point Render to our GitHub repo, rather than building our own Docker container
• --skip-action-mailer, --skip-action-mailbox We are using SMTP2GO’s API rather than the built-in emailing library
• --skip-test, --skip-system-test I’m omitting testing here not because it isn’t important but because I don’t know the first thing about testing. Ok, everybody has to start somewhere!
• --skip-ci No need to clutter our directory with these files until we’re ready to add CI. And we may not ever need to

2. Don’t commit your IDE files to VCS

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# /.gitignore

# Ignore NetBrains IDE config files
.idea/

3. Set up a database

Run ./bin/setup to set up the development database