Creating the Blog Application

3.2 Creating the Blog Application

Rails comes with a number of scripts called generators that are designed to make your development life easier by creating everything that's necessary to start working on a particular task. One of these is the new application generator, which will provide you with the foundation of a fresh Rails application so that you don't have to write it yourself.
To use this generator, open a terminal, navigate to a directory where you have rights to create files, and type:

$ rails new blog

This will create a Rails application called Blog in a blog directory and install the gem dependencies that are already mentioned in Gemfile using bundle install.

You can see all of the command line options that the Rails application builder accepts by running rails new -h.

After you create the blog application, switch to its folder:

$ cd blog

The blog directory has a number of auto-generated files and folders that make up the structure of a Rails application. Most of the work in this tutorial will happen in the app folder, but here's a basic rundown on the function of each of the files and folders that Rails created by default:

File/Folder	Purpose
app/	Contains the controllers, models, views, helpers, mailers and assets for your application. You'll focus on this folder for the remainder of this guide.
bin/	Contains the rails script that starts your app and can contain other scripts you use to deploy or run your application.
config/	Configure your application's routes, database, and more. This is covered in more detail in Configuring Rails Applications.
config.ru	Rack configuration for Rack based servers used to start the application.
db/	Contains your current database schema, as well as the database migrations.
Gemfile Gemfile.lock	These files allow you to specify what gem dependencies are needed for your Rails application. These files are used by the Bundler gem. For more information about Bundler, see the Bundler website.
lib/	Extended modules for your application.
log/	Application log files.
public/	The only folder seen by the world as-is. Contains static files and compiled assets.
Rakefile	This file locates and loads tasks that can be run from the command line. The task definitions are defined throughout the components of Rails. Rather than changing Rakefile, you should add your own tasks by adding files to the lib/tasks directory of your application.
README.rdoc	This is a brief instruction manual for your application. You should edit this file to tell others what your application does, how to set it up, and so on.
test/	Unit tests, fixtures, and other test apparatus. These are covered in Testing Rails Applications.
tmp/	Temporary files (like cache, pid, and session files).
vendor/	A place for all third-party code. In a typical Rails application this includes vendored gems.