Welcome to Rails
What's Rails?
Rails
is a web-application framework that includes everything needed to
create database-backed web applications according to the
Model-View-Controller (MVC)
pattern.
Understanding the MVC pattern is key to understanding Rails
. MVC divides your
application into three layers: Model, View, and Controller, each with a specific responsibility.
Model layer
The Model layer represents the domain model (such as Account, Product,
Person, Post, etc.) and encapsulates the business logic specific to
your application. In Rails, database-backed model classes are derived from
::ActiveRecord::Base
. Active Record allows you to present the data from
database rows as objects and embellish these data objects with business logic
methods.
Although most Rails
models are backed by a database, models can also be ordinary
Ruby classes, or Ruby classes that implement a set of interfaces as provided by
the Active Model module.
View layer
The View layer is composed of "templates" that are responsible for providing appropriate representations of your application's resources. Templates can come in a variety of formats, but most view templates are HTML with embedded Ruby code (ERB files). Views are typically rendered to generate a controller response or to generate the body of an email. In Rails, View generation is handled by Action View.
Controller layer
The Controller layer is responsible for handling incoming HTTP requests and
providing a suitable response. Usually, this means returning HTML, but Rails
controllers
can also generate XML, JSON, PDFs, mobile-specific views, and more. Controllers load and
manipulate models, and render view templates in order to generate the appropriate HTTP response.
In Rails, incoming requests are routed by Action Dispatch to an appropriate controller, and
controller classes are derived from ::ActionController::Base
. Action Dispatch and Action Controller
are bundled together in Action Pack.
Frameworks and libraries
Active Record, Active Model, Action Pack, and Action View can each be used independently outside Rails
.
In addition to that, Rails
also comes with:
- Action Mailer, a library to generate and send emails
- Action Mailbox, a library to receive emails within a
Rails
application - Active Job, a framework for declaring jobs and making them run on a variety of queuing backends
- Action Cable, a framework to integrate WebSockets with a
Rails
application - Active Storage, a library to attach cloud and local files to
Rails
applications - Action Text, a library to handle rich text content
- Active Support, a collection of utility classes and standard library extensions that are useful for
Rails
, and may also be used independently outsideRails
Getting Started
Install Rails at the command prompt if you haven't yet:
$ gem install rails
At the command prompt, create a new
Rails
application:$ rails new myapp
where "myapp" is the application name.
Change directory to
myapp
and start the web server:$ cd myapp $ bin/rails server
Run with --help
or -h
for options.
Go to
http://localhost:3000
and you'll see theRails
bootscreen with yourRails
and Ruby versions.Follow the guidelines to start developing your application. You may find the following resources handy:
Contributing
We encourage you to contribute to Ruby on Rails! Please check out the
Contributing to Ruby on Rails
guide for guidelines about how to proceed. Join us!
Trying to report a possible security vulnerability in Rails? Please check out our security policy for guidelines about how to proceed.
Everyone interacting in Rails
and its sub-projects' codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms, and mailing lists is expected to follow the Rails
code of conduct.
License
Ruby on Rails
is released under the MIT License.