You’re gonna start a new project using Ruby on Rails? Nice choice I’d say!
The main goal of this post is to provide a solid start for a general purpose project and to prevent hours of refactoring.
First things first: Ruby version
It’s highly recommended to use a Ruby version manager like rvm or rbenv.
I personally prefer rbenv, but pick your favorite tool.
To choose the Ruby version you should check the latest official release and install it using your ruby version manager:
$ rbenv install 3.1.2
Great! Now validate that you’re using the latest version:
$ ruby -v
ruby 3.1.2p20 (2022-04-12 revision 4491bb740a) [x86_64-darwin19]
Installing Rails
Next natural step is to install the latest version of Rails.
$ gem install rails -v 7.0.4
And again validate version was installed correctly:
$ rails -v
Rails 7.0.4
Creating the project
Now the juice!
There are many options to start a new Rails project, but there are 2 that are considered more important and that hopefully will follow you throughout the project’s lifetime.
database and test framework
For the database, there’s no safer option than PostgreSQL.
And for the test framework, the Ruby on Rails community has adopted Rspec as it’s favorite testing tool.
Now, with those options in mind, let’s create the project:
$ rails new my_awesome_project --skip-test -d postgresql
As you can see, there’s no option to select Rspec as the test framework in rails new command, so we’ll have to install it afterwards.
And that’s it for this post!
In sequence I’ll write how to install bundler, rspec-rails and other gems that can help in your Rails journey ;)
