release_1.md

Release 1: Starting from Scratch

Learning Competencies

• Understand how to create a Rails application from scratch
• Understand how to create simple resources in Rails
• Understand how to create non-standard views, routes, and resources in Rails

Summary

This week, we'll be building a substantial Rails application from the ground up: a StackOverflow clone. The goal is to focus on building a well-structured Rails application with a good mixture of front-end and back-end features.

You are training to be a professional developer, and its time to start acting like one. For the remainder of this project, you should:

Commit early and commit often. Commit on every feature completion, added dependency, and work stoppage. Commit with meaningful messages that accurately describe your alterations.

TDD everything. You will not be writing a single line of code on this project before you've written a test for it. If you need to explore the tool before you start writing production code, work on spike branches.

Be intentional about your time and learning. Focus on understanding every line of code that you write, and why you are writing it. The result should be a codebase that is clean, intentional, and ready for production.

First, let's check our installed version of Rails:

  $ rails -v

Your Rails version should be 4.x.

To create a new Rails 4 application with a postgres database and without the default testing framework, run:

  $ rails new dbc_overflow -T -d=postgresql

You'll also need to install rspec-rails, capybara, shoulda-matchers, and factory-girl in your project.

Features

• Create a valid readme with your project's intention.
• Create your question and answer models. A question and an answer should have a title and a content.
• Create a question index page that lists all questions.
• Create a question show page that lists the question and all associated answers.
• Modify your routes so your question index page is the root route.