Agile Web Development with Rails 5, 1st Edition

Creating a New Application

When you install the Rails framework, you also get a new command-line tool, rails, that’s used to construct each new Rails application you write.

Why do we need a tool to do this? Why can’t we just hack away in our favorite editor and create the source for our application from scratch? Well, we could just hack. After all, a Rails application is just Ruby source code. But Rails also does a lot of magic behind the curtain to get our applications to work with a minimum of explicit configuration. To get this magic to work, Rails needs to find all the various components of your application. As you’ll see later (in ​Where Things Go​), this means we need to create a specific directory structure, slotting the code we write ...