And we are back with part 2! I hope everyone’s week has been nice and productive so far. I’ve had so much to juggle this week but surprisingly I’m keeping up! Going into the next interview like:
😇🤣
Enough with the jokes, guys.
Which database to choose?
I decided to use SQLite because its already set up for us. It’s a powerful, embedded relational database management system and it’s good for testing and developing. You can, however, choose a different option such as PostgrSQL or MySQL. If I were planning on deploying this site and having lots of users I would probably choose postgreSQL. But since I’m just doing this side project for practice, I’ll stick with SQLite.
Setting Up Bootstrap and Devise
In my Gemfile, I added gem 'bootstrap-sass', '~> 3.4.1' for styling and gem 'devise' for user authentication.
The Devise gem is great because it does all the work of allowing new users to sign-up, sign-in, logout, reset passwords and so on. Bootstrap is fantastic because it makes styling your app so much faster and easier!
After adding these to my Gemfile, I ran bundle install in my terminal which gives us the newest versions of the gems we’ve added.
Next I ran rails generate devise:install to create the configuration file. Then, following the Devise gem README.md, I added config.action_mailer.default_url_options = { host: 'localhost', port: 3000 } to config/environments/development.rb which sets a default URL within our emails for actionmailer.
Setting Up Default Route
In config/routes.rb I added root to: "public#homepage" which will be the first page you see when you visit http://localhost:3000/
Then, I ran rails g devise:views which creates all my devise view files for later customization.
Next, I ran rails generate devise Account. This created a database migration and the necessary fields for the database table. I setup my database with rails db:setup and migrated it using rails db:migrate
Our First View
I ran rails g controller public which created app/contollers/public_controller.rb where I can add the first method:
def homepage
end
Then, I added a view file called homepage.html.erb in app/views/public where I inserted some dummy text for now, just to make sure my app was working properly. In app/views/public/homepage.html.erb:
<h1 class="mt-5">Welcome to IG Clone</h1>
Now when I visit http://localhost:3000/ I see “Welcome to IG Clone”. Beautiful! 😁
A Little More Bootstrap Setup
I went to Bootstrap and clicked ‘Free Download’. Then, I followed the instructions here to finish setup. I know, lots of tedious steps. 🥱 But now we won’t have to write out a bunch of CSS. 😁👍 It should look something like this:
I’m going to work on this some more as well as a few other tasks I have for this week. I may go into part 3 next week or I may choose another topic people typically struggle with. We will see. 🤷See you guys soon!
Peace,
Nica