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More Ruby on Rails

Getting Started with

Rails
This guide covers getting up and running
with Ruby on Rails.
After reading this guide, you will know:
How to install Rails, create a new
Rails application, and connect your
application to a database.
The general layout of a Rails
application.
The basic principles of MVC (Model,
View, Controller) and RESTful
design.
How to quickly generate the starting
pieces of a Rails application.

Chapters
1. Guide Assumptions
2. What is Rails?
3. Creating a New Rails Project
Installing Rails
Creating the Blog Application
4. Hello, Rails!
Starting up the Web Server
Say "Hello", Rails
Setting the Application Home Page
5. Getting Up and Running
Laying down the ground work
The first form
Creating articles

Creating the Article model

Running a Migration
Saving data in the controller
Showing Articles
Listing all articles
Adding links
Adding Some Validation
Updating Articles
Using partials to clean up duplication in views
Deleting Articles
6. Adding a Second Model
Generating a Model
Associating Models
Adding a Route for Comments
Generating a Controller
7. Refactoring
Rendering Partial Collections
Rendering a Partial Form
8. Deleting Comments
Deleting Associated Objects
9. Security
Basic Authentication
Other Security Considerations
10. What's Next?
11. Configuration Gotchas

1 Guide Assumptions
This guide is designed for beginners who want to get started with a Rails application from scratch. It does
not assume that you have any prior experience with Rails. However, to get the most out of it, you need to
have some prerequisites installed:
The Ruby language version 1.9.3 or newer.
The RubyGems packaging system, which is installed with Ruby versions 1.9 and later. To learn
more about RubyGems, please read the RubyGems Guides.
A working installation of the SQLite3 Database.
Rails is a web application framework running on the Ruby programming language. If you have no prior
experience with Ruby, you will find a very steep learning curve diving straight into Rails. There are several
curated lists of online resources for learning Ruby:
Ocial Ruby Programming Language website

reSRC's List of Free Programming Books

Be aware that some resources, while still excellent, cover versions of Ruby as old as 1.6, and commonly 1.8,
and will not include some syntax that you will see in day-to-day development with Rails.

2 What is Rails?
Rails is a web application development framework written in the Ruby language. It is designed to make
programming web applications easier by making assumptions about what every developer needs to get
started. It allows you to write less code while accomplishing more than many other languages and
frameworks. Experienced Rails developers also report that it makes web application development more fun.
Rails is opinionated software. It makes the assumption that there is the "best" way to do things, and it's
designed to encourage that way - and in some cases to discourage alternatives. If you learn "The Rails Way"
you'll probably discover a tremendous increase in productivity. If you persist in bringing old habits from other
languages to your Rails development, and trying to use patterns you learned elsewhere, you may have a
less happy experience.
The Rails philosophy includes two major guiding principles:
Don't Repeat Yourself: DRY is a principle of software development which states that "Every piece
of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system." By
not writing the same information over and over again, our code is more maintainable, more
extensible, and less buggy.
Convention Over Configuration: Rails has opinions about the best way to do many things in a
web application, and defaults to this set of conventions, rather than require that you specify every
minutiae through endless configuration files.

3 Creating a New Rails Project

The best way to use this guide is to follow each step as it happens, no code or step needed to make this
example application has been left out, so you can literally follow along step by step.
By following along with this guide, you'll create a Rails project called blog, a (very) simple weblog. Before
you can start building the application, you need to make sure that you have Rails itself installed.
The examples below use $ to represent your terminal prompt in a UNIX-like OS, though it may have been
customized to appear dierently. If you are using Windows, your prompt will look something like
c:\source_code>

3.1 Installing Rails

Open up a command line prompt. On Mac OS X open Terminal.app, on Windows choose "Run" from your
Start menu and type 'cmd.exe'. Any commands prefaced with a dollar sign $ should be run in the command
line. Verify that you have a current version of Ruby installed:
A number of tools exist to help you quickly install Ruby and Ruby on Rails on your system. Windows users
can use Rails Installer, while Mac OS X users can use Tokaido.

$ ruby -v

ruby 2.0.0p353

If you don't have Ruby installed have a look at ruby-lang.org for possible ways to install Ruby on your
platform.
Many popular UNIX-like OSes ship with an acceptable version of SQLite3. Windows users and others can
find installation instructions at the SQLite3 website. Verify that it is correctly installed and in your PATH:

$ sqlite3 --version

The program should report its version.

To install Rails, use the gem install command provided by RubyGems:

$ gem install rails

To verify that you have everything installed correctly, you should be able to run the following:

$ rails --version

If it says something like "Rails 4.2.0", you are ready to continue.

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
setup, 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.

4 Hello, Rails!
To begin with, let's get some text up on screen quickly. To do this, you need to get your Rails application

server running.

4.1 Starting up the Web Server

You actually have a functional Rails application already. To see it, you need to start a web server on your
development machine. You can do this by running the following in the blog directory:

$ bin/rails server

If you are using Windows, you have to pass the scripts under the bin folder directly to the Ruby interpreter
e.g. ruby bin\rails server.
Compiling CoeeScript and JavaScript asset compression requires you have a JavaScript runtime available
on your system, in the absence of a runtime you will see an execjs error during asset compilation. Usually
Mac OS X and Windows come with a JavaScript runtime installed. Rails adds the therubyracer gem to the
generated Gemfile in a commented line for new apps and you can uncomment if you need it.
therubyrhino is the recommended runtime for JRuby users and is added by default to the Gemfile in apps
generated under JRuby. You can investigate all the supported runtimes at ExecJS.
This will fire up WEBrick, a web server distributed with Ruby by default. To see your application in action,
open a browser window and navigate to http://localhost:3000. You should see the Rails default information
page:
To stop the web server, hit Ctrl+C in the terminal window where it's running. To verify the server has stopped
you should see your command prompt cursor again. For most UNIX-like systems including Mac OS X this
will be a dollar sign $. In development mode, Rails does not generally require you to restart the server;
changes you make in files will be automatically picked up by the server.
The "Welcome aboard" page is the smoke test for a new Rails application: it makes sure that you have your
software configured correctly enough to serve a page. You can also click on the About your application's
environment link to see a summary of your application's environment.

4.2 Say "Hello", Rails

To get Rails saying "Hello", you need to create at minimum a controller and a view.
A controller's purpose is to receive specific requests for the application. Routing decides which controller
receives which requests. Often, there is more than one route to each controller, and dierent routes can be
served by dierent actions. Each action's purpose is to collect information to provide it to a view.
A view's purpose is to display this information in a human readable format. An important distinction to make
is that it is the controller, not the view, where information is collected. The view should just display that
information. By default, view templates are written in a language called eRuby (Embedded Ruby) which is
processed by the request cycle in Rails before being sent to the user.
To create a new controller, you will need to run the "controller" generator and tell it you want a controller
called "welcome" with an action called "index", just like this:
$ bin/rails generate controller welcome index

Rails will create several files and a route for you.

create
route
invoke
create
create
invoke
create
invoke
create
invoke
invoke
create
invoke
create

app/controllers/welcome_controller.rb
get 'welcome/index'
erb
app/views/welcome
app/views/welcome/index.html.erb
test_unit
test/controllers/welcome_controller_test.rb
helper
app/helpers/welcome_helper.rb
assets
coffee
app/assets/javascripts/welcome.js.coffee
scss
app/assets/stylesheets/welcome.css.scss

Most important of these are of course the controller, located at

app/controllers/welcome_controller.rb and the view, located at
app/views/welcome/index.html.erb.
Open the app/views/welcome/index.html.erb file in your text editor. Delete all of the existing code in the
file, and replace it with the following single line of code:

<h1>Hello, Rails!</h1>

4.3 Setting the Application Home Page

Now that we have made the controller and view, we need to tell Rails when we want "Hello, Rails!" to show
up. In our case, we want it to show up when we navigate to the root URL of our site, http://localhost:3000.
At the moment, "Welcome aboard" is occupying that spot.
Next, you have to tell Rails where your actual home page is located.
Open the file config/routes.rb in your editor.

Rails.application.routes.draw do
get 'welcome/index'
#
#
#
#
#
#
#

The priority is based upon order of creation:

first created -> highest priority.
You can have the root of your site routed with "root"
root 'welcome#index'
...

This is your application's routing file which holds entries in a special DSL (domain-specific language) that
tells Rails how to connect incoming requests to controllers and actions. This file contains many sample
routes on commented lines, and one of them actually shows you how to connect the root of your site to a
specific controller and action. Find the line beginning with root and uncomment it. It should look something
like the following:

root 'welcome#index'

root 'welcome#index' tells Rails to map requests to the root of the application to the welcome

controller's index action and get 'welcome/index' tells Rails to map requests to
http://localhost:3000/welcome/index to the welcome controller's index action. This was created earlier
when you ran the controller generator (rails generate controller welcome index).
Launch the web server again if you stopped it to generate the controller (rails
server) and navigate to http://localhost:3000 in your browser. You'll see the "Hello, Rails!" message you
put into app/views/welcome/index.html.erb, indicating that this new route is indeed going to
WelcomeController's index action and is rendering the view correctly.
For more information about routing, refer to Rails Routing from the Outside In.

5 Getting Up and Running

Now that you've seen how to create a controller, an action and a view, let's create something with a bit more
substance.

In the Blog application, you will now create a new resource. A resource is the term used for a collection of
similar objects, such as articles, people or animals. You can create, read, update and destroy items for a
resource and these operations are referred to as CRUD operations.
Rails provides a resources method which can be used to declare a standard REST resource. You need to
add the article resource to the config/routes.rb as follows:

Rails.application.routes.draw do
resources :articles
root 'welcome#index'
end

If you run rake routes, you'll see that it has defined routes for all the standard RESTful actions. The
meaning of the prefix column (and other columns) will be seen later, but for now notice that Rails has
inferred the singular form article and makes meaningful use of the distinction.

$ bin/rake routes
Prefix Verb
articles GET
POST
new_article GET
edit_article GET
article GET
PATCH
PUT
DELETE
root GET

URI Pattern
/articles(.:format)
/articles(.:format)
/articles/new(.:format)
/articles/:id/edit(.:format)
/articles/:id(.:format)
/articles/:id(.:format)
/articles/:id(.:format)
/articles/:id(.:format)
/

Controller#Action
articles#index
articles#create
articles#new
articles#edit
articles#show
articles#update
articles#update
articles#destroy
welcome#index

In the next section, you will add the ability to create new articles in your application and be able to view
them. This is the "C" and the "R" from CRUD: creation and reading. The form for doing this will look like this:
It will look a little basic for now, but that's ok. We'll look at improving the styling for it afterwards.

5.1 Laying down the ground work

Firstly, you need a place within the application to create a new article. A great place for that would be at
/articles/new. With the route already defined, requests can now be made to /articles/new in the
application. Navigate to http://localhost:3000/articles/new and you'll see a routing error:
This error occurs because the route needs to have a controller defined in order to serve the request. The
solution to this particular problem is simple: create a controller called ArticlesController. You can do this
by running this command:

$ bin/rails g controller articles

If you open up the newly generated app/controllers/articles_controller.rb you'll see a fairly empty

controller:

class ArticlesController < ApplicationController

end

A controller is simply a class that is defined to inherit from ApplicationController. It's inside this class
that you'll define methods that will become the actions for this controller. These actions will perform CRUD
operations on the articles within our system.
There are public, private and protected methods in Ruby,
but only public methods can be actions for controllers.
For more details check out Programming Ruby.
If you refresh http://localhost:3000/articles/new now, you'll get a new error:
This error indicates that Rails cannot find the new action inside the ArticlesController that you just
generated. This is because when controllers are generated in Rails they are empty by default, unless you tell

it
your

wanted actions during the generation process.

To manually define an action inside a controller, all you need to do is to define a new method inside the
controller. Open app/controllers/articles_controller.rb and inside the ArticlesController class,
define a new method so that the controller now looks like this:

class ArticlesController < ApplicationController

def new
end
end

With the new method defined in ArticlesController, if you refresh http://localhost:3000/articles/new

you'll see another error:
You're getting this error now because Rails
expects plain actions like this one to have
views associated with them to display their
information. With no view available, Rails
errors out.
In the above image, the bottom line has been
truncated. Let's see what the full thing looks
like:

Missing template articles/new, application/new with {locale:[:en], formats:[:html], handlers:[:erb, :builder,

:coee]}. Searched in: * "/path/to/blog/app/views"

That's quite a lot of text! Let's quickly go through and understand what each part of it does.
The first part identifies what template is missing. In this case, it's the articles/new template. Rails will first
look for this template. If not found, then it will attempt to load a template called application/new. It looks
for one here because the ArticlesController inherits from ApplicationController.
The next part of the message contains a hash. The :locale key in this hash simply indicates what spoken
language template should be retrieved. By default, this is the English - or "en" - template. The next key,
:formats specifies the format of template to be served in response. The default format is :html, and so
Rails is looking for an HTML template. The final key, :handlers, is telling us what template handlers could
be used to render our template. :erb is most commonly used for HTML templates, :builder is used for
XML templates, and :coffee uses CoeeScript to build JavaScript templates.

The final part of this message tells us where Rails has looked for the templates. Templates within a basic
Rails application like this are kept in a single location, but in more complex applications it could be many
dierent paths.
The simplest template that would work in this case would be one located at
app/views/articles/new.html.erb. The extension of this file name is key: the first extension is the
format of the template, and the second extension is the handler that will be used. Rails is attempting to find
a template called articles/new within app/views for the application. The format for this template can only
be html and the handler must be one of erb, builder or coffee. Because you want to create a new HTML
form, you will be using the ERB language. Therefore the file should be called articles/new.html.erb and
needs to be located inside the app/views directory of the application.
Go ahead now and create a new file at app/views/articles/new.html.erb and write this content in it:

<h1>New Article</h1>

When you refresh http://localhost:3000/articles/new you'll now see that the page has a title. The route,
controller, action and view are now working harmoniously! It's time to create the form for a new article.

5.2 The first form

To create a form within this template, you will use a form builder. The primary form builder for Rails is
provided by a helper method called form_for. To use this method, add this code into
app/views/articles/new.html.erb:

<%= form_for :article do |f| %>

<p>
<%= f.label :title %><br>
<%= f.text_field :title %>
</p>
<p>
<%= f.label :text %><br>
<%= f.text_area :text %>
</p>
<p>
<%= f.submit %>
</p>
<% end %>

If you refresh the page now, you'll see the exact same form as in the example. Building forms in Rails is
really just that easy!
When you call form_for, you pass it an identifying object for this form. In this case, it's the symbol
:article. This tells the form_for helper what this form is for. Inside the block for this method, the
FormBuilder object - represented by f - is used to build two labels and two text fields, one each for the title
and text of an article. Finally, a call to submit on the f object will create a submit button for the form.

There's one problem with this form though. If you inspect the HTML that is generated, by viewing the source
of the page, you will see that the action attribute for the form is pointing at /articles/new. This is a
problem because this route goes to the very page that you're on right at the moment, and that route should
only be used to display the form for a new article.
The form needs to use a dierent URL in order to go somewhere else. This can be done quite simply with
the :url option of form_for. Typically in Rails, the action that is used for new form submissions like this is
called "create", and so the form should be pointed to that action.
Edit the form_for line inside app/views/articles/new.html.erb to look like this:

<%= form_for :article, url: articles_path do |f| %>

In this example, the articles_path helper is passed to the :url option. To see what Rails will do with this,
we look back at the output of rake routes:

$ bin/rake routes
Prefix Verb
articles GET
POST
new_article GET
edit_article GET
article GET
PATCH
PUT
DELETE
root GET

URI Pattern
/articles(.:format)
/articles(.:format)
/articles/new(.:format)
/articles/:id/edit(.:format)
/articles/:id(.:format)
/articles/:id(.:format)
/articles/:id(.:format)
/articles/:id(.:format)
/

Controller#Action
articles#index
articles#create
articles#new
articles#edit
articles#show
articles#update
articles#update
articles#destroy
welcome#index

The articles_path helper tells Rails to point the form to the URI Pattern associated with the articles
prefix; and the form will (by default) send a POST request to that route. This is associated with the create
action of the current controller, the ArticlesController.
With the form and its associated route defined, you will be able to fill in the form and then click the submit
button to begin the process of creating a new article, so go ahead and do that. When you submit the form,
you should see a familiar error:

You now need to create the create action within the ArticlesController for this to work.

5.3 Creating articles

To make the "Unknown action" go away, you can define a create action within the ArticlesController

class in app/controllers/articles_controller.rb, underneath the new action, as shown:

class ArticlesController < ApplicationController

def new
end
def create
end
end

If you re-submit the form now, you'll see another familiar error: a template is missing. That's ok, we can
ignore that for now. What the create action should be doing is saving our new article to the database.
When a form is submitted, the fields of the form are sent to Rails as parameters. These parameters can then
be referenced inside the controller actions, typically to perform a particular task. To see what these
parameters look like, change the create action to this:

def create
render plain: params[:article].inspect
end

The render method here is taking a very simple hash with a key of plain and value of
params[:article].inspect. The params method is the object which represents the parameters (or fields)
coming in from the form. The params method returns an ActiveSupport::HashWithIndifferentAccess
object, which allows you to access the keys of the hash using either strings or symbols. In this situation, the
only parameters that matter are the ones from the form.
Ensure you have a firm grasp of the params method, as you'll use it fairly regularly. Let's consider an
example URL: http://www.example.com/?username=dhh&email=dhh@email.com. In this URL,
params[:username] would equal "dhh" and params[:email] would equal "dhh@email.com".
If you re-submit the form one more time you'll now no longer get the missing template error. Instead, you'll
see something that looks like the following:

{"title"=>"First article!", "text"=>"This is my first article."}

This action is now displaying the parameters for the article that are coming in from the form. However, this
isn't really all that helpful. Yes, you can see the parameters but nothing in particular is being done with them.

5.4 Creating the Article model

Models in Rails use a singular name, and their corresponding database tables use a plural name. Rails
provides a generator for creating models, which most Rails developers tend to use when creating new
models. To create the new model, run this command in your terminal:

$ bin/rails generate model Article title:string text:text

With that command we told Rails that we want a Article model, together with a title attribute of type string,
and a text attribute of type text. Those attributes are automatically added to the articles table in the
database and mapped to the Article model.
Rails responded by creating a bunch of files. For now, we're only interested in app/models/article.rb
and db/migrate/20140120191729_create_articles.rb (your name could be a bit dierent). The latter is
responsible for creating the database structure, which is what we'll look at next.
Active Record is smart enough to automatically map column names to model attributes, which means you
don't have to declare attributes inside Rails models, as that will be done automatically by Active Record.

5.5 Running a Migration

As we've just seen, rails generate model created a database migration file inside the db/migrate
directory. Migrations are Ruby classes that are designed to make it simple to create and modify database
tables. Rails uses rake commands to run migrations, and it's possible to undo a migration after it's been
applied to your database. Migration filenames include a timestamp to ensure that they're processed in the
order that they were created.
If you look in the db/migrate/20140120191729_create_articles.rb file (remember, yours will have a
slightly dierent name), here's what you'll find:

class CreateArticles < ActiveRecord::Migration

def change
create_table :articles do |t|
t.string :title
t.text :text
t.timestamps null: false
end
end
end

The above migration creates a method named change which will be called when you run this migration. The
action defined in this method is also reversible, which means Rails knows how to reverse the change made
by this migration, in case you want to reverse it later. When you run this migration it will create an articles
table with one string column and a text column. It also creates two timestamp fields to allow Rails to track
article creation and update times.
For more information about migrations, refer to Rails Database Migrations.
At this point, you can use a rake command to run the migration:

$ bin/rake db:migrate

Rails will execute this migration command and tell you it created the Articles table.

== CreateArticles: migrating
==================================================
-- create_table(:articles)
-> 0.0019s
== CreateArticles: migrated (0.0020s)
=========================================

Because you're working in the development environment by default, this

command will apply to the database defined in the development section of your
config/database.yml file. If you would like to execute migrations in another
environment, for instance in production, you must explicitly pass it when
invoking the command: rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production.

5.6 Saving data in the controller

Back in ArticlesController, we need to change the create action to use the new Article model to
save the data in the database. Open app/controllers/articles_controller.rb and change the create
action to look like this:

def create
@article = Article.new(params[:article])
@article.save
redirect_to @article
end

Here's what's going on: every Rails model can be initialized with its respective attributes, which are
automatically mapped to the respective database columns. In the first line we do just that (remember that
params[:article] contains the attributes we're interested in). Then, @article.save is responsible for
saving the model in the database. Finally, we redirect the user to the show action, which we'll define later.
You might be wondering why the A in Article.new is capitalized above, whereas most other references to
articles in this guide have used lowercase. In this context, we are referring to the class named Article that
is defined in \models\article.rb. Class names in Ruby must begin with a capital letter.
As we'll see later, @article.save returns a boolean indicating whether the article was saved or not.
If you now go to http://localhost:3000/articles/new you'll almost be able to create an article. Try it! You
should get an error that looks like this:
Rails has several security features that help you write secure applications, and you're running into one of
them now. This one is called strong parameters, which requires us to tell Rails exactly which parameters
are allowed into our controller actions.
Why do you have to bother? The ability to grab and automatically assign all controller parameters to your
model in one shot makes the programmer's job easier, but this convenience also allows malicious use. What
if a request to the server was crafted to look like a new article form submit but also included extra fields with
values that violated your applications integrity? They would be 'mass assigned' into your model and then
into the database along with the good stu - potentially breaking your application or worse.

We have to
whitelist our
controller
parameters to
prevent
wrongful mass
assignment. In
this case, we
want to both
allow and
require the
title and text
parameters for
valid use of
create. The syntax for this introduces require and permit. The change will involve one line in the create
action:

@article = Article.new(params.require(:article).permit(:title, :text))

This is often factored out into its own method so it can be reused by multiple actions in the same controller,
for example create and update. Above and beyond mass assignment issues, the method is often made
private to make sure it can't be called outside its intended context. Here is the result:

def create
@article = Article.new(article_params)
@article.save
redirect_to @article
end
private
def article_params
params.require(:article).permit(:title, :text)
end

For more information, refer to the reference above and this blog article about Strong Parameters.

5.7 Showing Articles

If you submit the form again now, Rails will complain about not finding the show action. That's not very
useful though, so let's add the show action before proceeding.
As we have seen in the output of rake routes, the route for show action is as follows:

article GET

/articles/:id(.:format)

articles#show

The special syntax :id tells rails that this route expects an :id parameter, which in our case will be the id of

the article.
As we did before, we need to add the show action in app/controllers/articles_controller.rb and its
respective view.
A frequent practice is to place the standard CRUD actions in each
controller in the following order: index, show, new, edit, create, update
and destroy. You may use any order you choose, but keep in mind that these
are public methods; as mentioned earlier in this guide, they must be placed
before any private or protected method in the controller in order to work.
Given that, let's add the show action, as follows:

class ArticlesController < ApplicationController

def show
@article = Article.find(params[:id])
end
def new
end
# snipped for brevity

A couple of things to note. We use Article.find to find the article we're interested in, passing in
params[:id] to get the :id parameter from the request. We also use an instance variable (prefixed with @)
to hold a reference to the article object. We do this because Rails will pass all instance variables to the view.
Now, create a new file app/views/articles/show.html.erb with the following content:

<p>
<strong>Title:</strong>
<%= @article.title %>
</p>
<p>
<strong>Text:</strong>
<%= @article.text %>
</p>

With this change, you should finally be able to create new articles. Visit http://localhost:3000/articles/new
and give it a try!

5.8 Listing all articles

We still need a way to list all our articles, so let's do that. The
route for this as per output of rake routes is:

articles GET

/articles(.:format)

articles#index

Add the corresponding index action for that route inside the ArticlesController in the
app/controllers/articles_controller.rb file. When we write an index action, the usual practice is to
place it as the first method in the controller. Let's do it:

class ArticlesController < ApplicationController

def index
@articles = Article.all
end
def show
@article = Article.find(params[:id])
end
def new
end
# snipped for brevity

And then finally, add the view for this action, located at app/views/articles/index.html.erb:

<h1>Listing articles</h1>
<table>
<tr>
<th>Title</th>
<th>Text</th>
</tr>
<% @articles.each do |article| %>
<tr>
<td><%= article.title %></td>
<td><%= article.text %></td>
</tr>
<% end %>
</table>

Now if you go to http://localhost:3000/articles you will see a list of all the articles that you have created.

5.9 Adding links

You can now create, show, and list articles. Now let's add some links to navigate through pages.
Open app/views/welcome/index.html.erb and modify it as follows:

<h1>Hello, Rails!</h1>
<%= link_to 'My Blog', controller: 'articles' %>

The link_to method is one of Rails' built-in view helpers. It creates a hyperlink based on text to display and

where to go - in this case, to the path for articles.

Let's add links to the other views as well, starting with adding this "New Article" link to
app/views/articles/index.html.erb, placing it above the <table> tag:

<%= link_to 'New article', new_article_path %>

This link will allow you to bring up the form that lets you create a new article.
Now, add another link in app/views/articles/new.html.erb, underneath the form, to go back to the
index action:

<%= form_for :article, url: articles_path do |f| %>

...
<% end %>
<%= link_to 'Back', articles_path %>

Finally, add a link to the app/views/articles/show.html.erb template to go back to the index action as
well, so that people who are viewing a single article can go back and view the whole list again:

<p>
<strong>Title:</strong>
<%= @article.title %>
</p>
<p>
<strong>Text:</strong>
<%= @article.text %>
</p>
<%= link_to 'Back', articles_path %>

If you want to link to an action in the same controller, you don't need to specify the :controller option, as
Rails will use the current controller by default.
In development mode (which is what you're working in by default), Rails reloads your application with every
browser request, so there's no need to stop and restart the web server when a change is made.

5.10 Adding Some Validation

The model file, app/models/article.rb is about as simple as it can get:

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base

end

There isn't much to this file - but note that the Article class inherits from ActiveRecord::Base. Active
Record supplies a great deal of functionality to your Rails models for free, including basic database CRUD
(Create, Read, Update, Destroy) operations, data validation, as well as sophisticated search support and the
ability to relate multiple models to one another.
Rails includes methods to help you validate the data that you send to models. Open the
app/models/article.rb file and edit it:

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base

validates :title, presence: true,
length: { minimum: 5 }
end

These changes will ensure that all articles have a title that is at least five characters long. Rails can validate a
variety of conditions in a model, including the presence or uniqueness of columns, their format, and the
existence of associated objects. Validations are covered in detail in Active Record Validations.
With the validation now in place, when you call @article.save on an invalid article, it will return false. If
you open app/controllers/articles_controller.rb again, you'll notice that we don't check the result
of calling @article.save inside the create action. If @article.save fails in this situation, we need to
show the form back to the user. To do this, change the new and create actions inside
app/controllers/articles_controller.rb to these:

def new
@article = Article.new
end
def create
@article = Article.new(article_params)
if @article.save
redirect_to @article
else
render 'new'
end
end
private
def article_params
params.require(:article).permit(:title, :text)
end

The new action is now creating a new instance variable called @article, and you'll see why that is in just a
few moments.
Notice that inside the create action we use render instead of redirect_to when save returns false. The
render method is used so that the @article object is passed back to the new template when it is rendered.
This rendering is done within the same request as the form submission, whereas the redirect_to will tell
the browser to issue another request.

If you reload http://localhost:3000/articles/new and try to save an article without a title, Rails will send you
back to the form, but that's not very useful. You need to tell the user that something went wrong. To do that,
you'll modify app/views/articles/new.html.erb to check for error messages:

<%= form_for :article, url: articles_path do |f| %>

<% if @article.errors.any? %>
<div id="error_explanation">
<h2>
<%= pluralize(@article.errors.count, "error") %> prohibited
this article from being saved:
</h2>
<ul>
<% @article.errors.full_messages.each do |msg| %>
<li><%= msg %></li>
<% end %>
</ul>
</div>
<% end %>
<p>
<%= f.label :title %><br>
<%= f.text_field :title %>
</p>
<p>
<%= f.label :text %><br>
<%= f.text_area :text %>
</p>
<p>
<%= f.submit %>
</p>
<% end %>
<%= link_to 'Back', articles_path %>

A few things are going on. We check if there are any errors with @article.errors.any?, and in that case
we show a list of all errors with @article.errors.full_messages.
pluralize is a rails helper that takes a number and a string as its arguments. If the number is greater than

one, the string will be automatically pluralized.

The reason why we added @article = Article.new in the ArticlesController is that otherwise
@article would be nil in our view, and calling @article.errors.any? would throw an error.
Rails automatically wraps fields that contain an error with a div with class field_with_errors. You can
define a css rule to make them standout.
Now you'll get a nice error message when saving an article without title when you attempt to do just that on
the new article form http://localhost:3000/articles/new:

5.11 Updating Articles

We've covered the "CR" part of CRUD. Now let's focus on the "U" part, updating articles.
The first step we'll take is adding an edit action to the ArticlesController, generally between the new
and create actions, as shown:

def new
@article = Article.new
end
def edit
@article = Article.find(params[:id])
end
def create
@article = Article.new(article_params)
if @article.save
redirect_to @article
else
render 'new'
end
end

The view will contain a form similar to the one we used when creating new articles. Create a file called
app/views/articles/edit.html.erb and make it look as follows:

<h1>Editing article</h1>
<%= form_for :article, url: article_path(@article), method: :patch do
|f| %>
<% if @article.errors.any? %>
<div id="error_explanation">
<h2>
<%= pluralize(@article.errors.count, "error") %> prohibited
this article from being saved:
</h2>
<ul>
<% @article.errors.full_messages.each do |msg| %>
<li><%= msg %></li>
<% end %>

</ul>
</div>
<% end %>
<p>
<%= f.label :title %><br>
<%= f.text_field :title %>
</p>
<p>
<%= f.label :text %><br>
<%= f.text_area :text %>
</p>
<p>
<%= f.submit %>
</p>
<% end %>
<%= link_to 'Back', articles_path %>

This time we point the form to the update action, which is not defined yet but will be very soon.
The method: :patch option tells Rails that we want this form to be submitted via the PATCH HTTP method
which is the HTTP method you're expected to use to update resources according to the REST protocol.
The first parameter of form_for can be an object, say, @article which would cause the helper to fill in the
form with the fields of the object. Passing in a symbol (:article) with the same name as the instance
variable (@article) also automagically leads to the same behavior. This is what is happening here. More
details can be found in form_for documentation.
Next, we need to create the update action in app/controllers/articles_controller.rb. Add it
between the create action and the private method:

def create
@article = Article.new(article_params)
if @article.save
redirect_to @article
else
render 'new'
end
end
def update
@article = Article.find(params[:id])
if @article.update(article_params)
redirect_to @article
else
render 'edit'
end
end

private
def article_params
params.require(:article).permit(:title, :text)
end

The new method, update, is used when you want to update a record that already exists, and it accepts a
hash containing the attributes that you want to update. As before, if there was an error updating the article
we want to show the form back to the user.
We reuse the article_params method that we defined earlier for the create action.
You don't need to pass all attributes to update. For example, if you'd call @article.update(title: 'A
new title') Rails would only update the title attribute, leaving all other attributes untouched.
Finally, we want to show a link to the edit action in the list of all the articles, so let's add that now to
app/views/articles/index.html.erb to make it appear next to the "Show" link:

<table>
<tr>
<th>Title</th>
<th>Text</th>
<th colspan="2"></th>
</tr>
<% @articles.each do |article| %>
<tr>
<td><%= article.title %></td>
<td><%= article.text %></td>
<td><%= link_to 'Show', article_path(article) %></td>
<td><%= link_to 'Edit', edit_article_path(article) %></td>
</tr>
<% end %>
</table>

And we'll also add one to the app/views/articles/show.html.erb template as well, so that there's also
an "Edit" link on an article's page. Add this at the bottom of the template:

...
<%= link_to 'Edit', edit_article_path(@article) %> |
<%= link_to 'Back', articles_path %>

And here's how our app looks so far:

5.12 Using partials to clean up duplication in views

Our edit page looks very similar to the new page; in fact, they both share the same code for displaying the
form. Let's remove this duplication by using a view partial. By convention, partial files are prefixed with an
underscore.

You can read more about

partials in the Layouts and
Rendering in Rails guide.
Create a new file

app/views/articles/_form.html.erb with the following content:

<%= form_for @article do |f| %>

<% if @article.errors.any? %>
<div id="error_explanation">
<h2>
<%= pluralize(@article.errors.count, "error") %> prohibited
this article from being saved:
</h2>
<ul>
<% @article.errors.full_messages.each do |msg| %>
<li><%= msg %></li>
<% end %>
</ul>
</div>
<% end %>
<p>
<%= f.label :title %><br>
<%= f.text_field :title %>
</p>
<p>
<%= f.label :text %><br>
<%= f.text_area :text %>
</p>
<p>
<%= f.submit %>
</p>
<% end %>

Everything except for the form_for declaration remained the same. The reason we can use this shorter,
simpler form_for declaration to stand in for either of the other forms is that @article is a resource
corresponding to a full set of RESTful routes, and Rails is able to infer which URI and method to use. For
more information about this use of form_for, see Resource-oriented style.
Now, let's update the app/views/articles/new.html.erb view to use this new partial, rewriting it

completely:

<h1>New article</h1>
<%= render 'form' %>
<%= link_to 'Back', articles_path %>

Then do the same for the app/views/articles/edit.html.erb view:

<h1>Edit article</h1>
<%= render 'form' %>
<%= link_to 'Back', articles_path %>

5.13 Deleting Articles

We're now ready to cover the "D" part of CRUD, deleting articles from the database. Following the REST
convention, the route for deleting articles as per output of rake routes is:

DELETE /articles/:id(.:format)

articles#destroy

The delete routing method should be used for routes that destroy resources. If this was left as a typical get
route, it could be possible for people to craft malicious URLs like this:

<a href='http://example.com/articles/1/destroy'>look at this cat!</a>

We use the delete method for destroying resources, and this route is mapped to the destroy action inside
app/controllers/articles_controller.rb, which doesn't exist yet. The destroy method is generally
the last CRUD action in the controller, and like the other public CRUD actions, it must be placed before any
private or protected methods. Let's add it:

def destroy
@article = Article.find(params[:id])
@article.destroy
redirect_to articles_path
end

The complete ArticlesController in the app/controllers/articles_controller.rb file should now

look like this:

class ArticlesController < ApplicationController

def index
@articles = Article.all
end
def show
@article = Article.find(params[:id])
end
def new
@article = Article.new
end
def edit
@article = Article.find(params[:id])
end
def create
@article = Article.new(article_params)
if @article.save
redirect_to @article
else
render 'new'
end
end
def update
@article = Article.find(params[:id])
if @article.update(article_params)
redirect_to @article
else
render 'edit'
end
end
def destroy
@article = Article.find(params[:id])
@article.destroy
redirect_to articles_path
end
private
def article_params
params.require(:article).permit(:title, :text)
end
end

You can call destroy on Active Record objects when you want to delete them from the database. Note that
we don't need to add a view for this action since we're redirecting to the index action.
Finally, add a 'Destroy' link to your index action template (app/views/articles/index.html.erb) to wrap
everything together.

<h1>Listing Articles</h1>

<%= link_to 'New article', new_article_path %>

<table>
<tr>
<th>Title</th>
<th>Text</th>
<th colspan="3"></th>
</tr>
<% @articles.each do |article| %>
<tr>
<td><%= article.title %></td>
<td><%= article.text %></td>
<td><%= link_to 'Show', article_path(article) %></td>
<td><%= link_to 'Edit', edit_article_path(article) %></td>
<td><%= link_to 'Destroy', article_path(article),
method: :delete,
data: { confirm: 'Are you sure?' } %></td>
</tr>
<% end %>
</table>

Here we're using link_to in a dierent way. We pass the named route as the second argument, and then
the options as another argument. The :method and :'data-confirm' options are used as HTML5
attributes so that when the link is clicked, Rails will first show a confirm dialog to the user, and then submit
the link with method delete. This is done via the JavaScript file jquery_ujs which is automatically included
into your application's layout (app/views/layouts/application.html.erb) when you generated the
application. Without this file, the confirmation dialog box wouldn't appear.

Congratulations, you can now create, show, list, update and destroy articles.
In general, Rails encourages using resources objects instead of declaring routes manually. For more
information about routing, see Rails Routing from the Outside In.

6 Adding a Second Model

It's time to add a second model to the application. The second model will handle comments on articles.

6.1 Generating a Model

We're going to see the same generator that we used before when creating the Article model. This time
we'll create a Comment model to hold reference of article comments. Run this command in your terminal:

$ bin/rails generate model Comment commenter:string body:text

article:references

This command will generate four files:

File

Purpose

db/migrate/20140120201010_create_comments.rb

Migration to create the comments table in your

database (your name will include a dierent
timestamp)

app/models/comment.rb

The Comment model

test/models/comment_test.rb

Testing harness for the comments model

test/fixtures/comments.yml

Sample comments for use in testing

First, take a look at app/models/comment.rb:

class Comment < ActiveRecord::Base

belongs_to :article
end

This is very similar to the Article model that you saw earlier. The dierence is the line belongs_to
:article, which sets up an Active Record association. You'll learn a little about associations in the next
section of this guide.
In addition to the model, Rails has also made a migration to create the corresponding database table:

class CreateComments < ActiveRecord::Migration

def change
create_table :comments do |t|
t.string :commenter
t.text :body
# this line adds an integer column called `article_id`.
t.references :article, index: true
t.timestamps null: false
end
add_foreign_key :comments, :articles
end
end

The t.references line sets up a foreign key column for the association between the two models. An index
for this association is also created on this column. Go ahead and run the migration:

$ bin/rake db:migrate

Rails is smart enough to only execute the migrations that have not already been run against the current
database, so in this case you will just see:

== CreateComments: migrating
=================================================
-- create_table(:comments)
-> 0.0115s
-- add_foreign_key(:comments, :articles)
-> 0.0000s
== CreateComments: migrated (0.0119s)
========================================

6.2 Associating Models

Active Record associations let you easily declare the relationship between two models. In the case of
comments and articles, you could write out the relationships this way:
Each comment belongs to one article.
One article can have many comments.
In fact, this is very close to the syntax that Rails uses to declare this association. You've already seen the
line of code inside the Comment model (app/models/comment.rb) that makes each comment belong to an
Article:

class Comment < ActiveRecord::Base

belongs_to :article
end

You'll need to edit app/models/article.rb to add the other side of the association:

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base

has_many :comments
validates :title, presence: true,
length: { minimum: 5 }
end

These two declarations enable a good bit of automatic behavior. For example, if you have an instance
variable @article containing an article, you can retrieve all the comments belonging to that article as an
array using @article.comments.

For more information on Active Record associations, see the Active Record Associations guide.

6.3 Adding a Route for Comments

As with the welcome controller, we will need to add a route so that Rails knows where we would like to
navigate to see comments. Open up the config/routes.rb file again, and edit it as follows:

resources :articles do
resources :comments
end

This creates comments as a nested resource within articles. This is another part of capturing the
hierarchical relationship that exists between articles and comments.
For more information on routing, see the Rails Routing guide.

6.4 Generating a Controller

With the model in hand, you can turn your attention to creating a matching controller. Again, we'll use the
same generator we used before:

$ bin/rails generate controller Comments

This creates five files and one empty directory:

File/Directory

Purpose

app/controllers/comments_controller.rb

The Comments controller

app/views/comments/

Views of the controller are stored here

test/controllers/comments_controller_test.rb

The test for the controller

app/helpers/comments_helper.rb

A view helper file

app/assets/javascripts/comment.js.coee

CoeeScript for the controller

app/assets/stylesheets/comment.css.scss

Cascading style sheet for the controller

Like with any blog, our readers will create their comments directly after reading the article, and once they
have added their comment, will be sent back to the article show page to see their comment now listed. Due
to this, our CommentsController is there to provide a method to create comments and delete spam
comments when they arrive.
So first, we'll wire up the Article show template (app/views/articles/show.html.erb) to let us make a
new comment:

<p>
<strong>Title:</strong>
<%= @article.title %>
</p>
<p>
<strong>Text:</strong>
<%= @article.text %>
</p>
<h2>Add a comment:</h2>
<%= form_for([@article, @article.comments.build]) do |f| %>
<p>
<%= f.label :commenter %><br>
<%= f.text_field :commenter %>
</p>
<p>
<%= f.label :body %><br>
<%= f.text_area :body %>
</p>
<p>
<%= f.submit %>
</p>
<% end %>
<%= link_to 'Edit', edit_article_path(@article) %> |
<%= link_to 'Back', articles_path %>

This adds a form on the Article show page that creates a new comment by calling the
CommentsController create action. The form_for call here uses an array, which will build a nested route,
such as /articles/1/comments.
Let's wire up the create in app/controllers/comments_controller.rb:

class CommentsController < ApplicationController

def create
@article = Article.find(params[:article_id])
@comment = @article.comments.create(comment_params)
redirect_to article_path(@article)
end
private
def comment_params
params.require(:comment).permit(:commenter, :body)
end
end

You'll see a bit more complexity here than you did in the controller for articles. That's a side-eect of the
nesting that you've set up. Each request for a comment has to keep track of the article to which the
comment is attached, thus the initial call to the find method of the Article model to get the article in
question.
In addition, the code takes advantage of some of the methods available for an association. We use the

create method on @article.comments to create and save the comment. This will automatically link the

comment so that it belongs to that particular article.

Once we have made the new comment, we send the user back to the original article using the
article_path(@article) helper. As we have already seen, this calls the show action of the
ArticlesController which in turn renders the show.html.erb template. This is where we want the
comment to show, so let's add that to the app/views/articles/show.html.erb.

<p>
<strong>Title:</strong>
<%= @article.title %>
</p>
<p>
<strong>Text:</strong>
<%= @article.text %>
</p>
<h2>Comments</h2>
<% @article.comments.each do |comment| %>
<p>
<strong>Commenter:</strong>
<%= comment.commenter %>
</p>
<p>
<strong>Comment:</strong>
<%= comment.body %>
</p>
<% end %>
<h2>Add a comment:</h2>
<%= form_for([@article, @article.comments.build]) do |f| %>
<p>
<%= f.label :commenter %><br>
<%= f.text_field :commenter %>
</p>
<p>
<%= f.label :body %><br>
<%= f.text_area :body %>
</p>
<p>
<%= f.submit %>
</p>
<% end %>
<%= link_to 'Edit', edit_article_path(@article) %> |
<%= link_to 'Back', articles_path %>

Now you can add articles and comments to your blog and have them show up in the right places.

7 Refactoring
Now that we have articles and comments working, take a look at the
app/views/articles/show.html.erb template. It is getting long and awkward. We can use partials to

clean it up.

7.1 Rendering Partial Collections

First, we will make a comment partial to extract
showing all the comments for the article. Create the
file app/views/comments/_comment.html.erb and
put the following into it:

<p>
<strong>Commenter:</strong>
<%= comment.commenter %>
</p>
<p>
<strong>Comment:</strong>
<%= comment.body %>
</p>

Then you can change app/views/articles/show.html.erb to look like the following:

<p>
<strong>Title:</strong>
<%= @article.title %>
</p>
<p>
<strong>Text:</strong>
<%= @article.text %>
</p>
<h2>Comments</h2>

<%= render @article.comments %>

<h2>Add a comment:</h2>
<%= form_for([@article, @article.comments.build]) do |f| %>
<p>
<%= f.label :commenter %><br>
<%= f.text_field :commenter %>
</p>
<p>
<%= f.label :body %><br>
<%= f.text_area :body %>
</p>
<p>
<%= f.submit %>
</p>
<% end %>
<%= link_to 'Edit', edit_article_path(@article) %> |
<%= link_to 'Back', articles_path %>

This will now render the partial in app/views/comments/_comment.html.erb once for each comment that
is in the @article.comments collection. As the render method iterates over the @article.comments
collection, it assigns each comment to a local variable named the same as the partial, in this case comment
which is then available in the partial for us to show.

7.2 Rendering a Partial Form

Let us also move that new comment section out to its own partial. Again, you create a file
app/views/comments/_form.html.erb containing:

<%= form_for([@article, @article.comments.build]) do |f| %>

<p>
<%= f.label :commenter %><br>
<%= f.text_field :commenter %>
</p>
<p>
<%= f.label :body %><br>
<%= f.text_area :body %>
</p>
<p>
<%= f.submit %>
</p>
<% end %>

Then you make the app/views/articles/show.html.erb look like the following:

<p>
<strong>Title:</strong>
<%= @article.title %>
</p>
<p>
<strong>Text:</strong>

<%= @article.text %>

</p>
<h2>Comments</h2>
<%= render @article.comments %>
<h2>Add a comment:</h2>
<%= render 'comments/form' %>
<%= link_to 'Edit', edit_article_path(@article) %> |
<%= link_to 'Back', articles_path %>

The second render just defines the partial template we want to render, comments/form. Rails is smart
enough to spot the forward slash in that string and realize that you want to render the _form.html.erb file
in the app/views/comments directory.
The @article object is available to any partials rendered in the view because we defined it as an instance
variable.

8 Deleting Comments
Another important feature of a blog is being able to delete spam comments. To do this, we need to
implement a link of some sort in the view and a destroy action in the CommentsController.
So first, let's add the delete link in the app/views/comments/_comment.html.erb partial:

<p>
<strong>Commenter:</strong>
<%= comment.commenter %>
</p>
<p>
<strong>Comment:</strong>
<%= comment.body %>
</p>
<p>
<%= link_to 'Destroy Comment', [comment.article, comment],
method: :delete,
data: { confirm: 'Are you sure?' } %>
</p>

Clicking this new "Destroy Comment" link will fire o a DELETE

/articles/:article_id/comments/:id to our CommentsController, which can then use this to find the
comment we want to delete, so let's add a destroy action to our controller
(app/controllers/comments_controller.rb):

class CommentsController < ApplicationController

def create
@article = Article.find(params[:article_id])
@comment = @article.comments.create(comment_params)
redirect_to article_path(@article)

end
def destroy
@article = Article.find(params[:article_id])
@comment = @article.comments.find(params[:id])
@comment.destroy
redirect_to article_path(@article)
end
private
def comment_params
params.require(:comment).permit(:commenter, :body)
end
end

The destroy action will find the article we are looking at, locate the comment within the
@article.comments collection, and then remove it from the database and send us back to the show action
for the article.

8.1 Deleting Associated Objects

If you delete an article, its associated comments will also need to be deleted, otherwise they would simply
occupy space in the database. Rails allows you to use the dependent option of an association to achieve
this. Modify the Article model, app/models/article.rb, as follows:

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base

has_many :comments, dependent: :destroy
validates :title, presence: true,
length: { minimum: 5 }
end

9 Security
9.1 Basic Authentication
If you were to publish your blog online, anyone would be able to add, edit and delete articles or delete
comments.
Rails provides a very simple HTTP authentication system that will work nicely in this situation.
In the ArticlesController we need to have a way to block access to the various actions if the person is
not authenticated. Here we can use the Rails http_basic_authenticate_with method, which allows
access to the requested action if that method allows it.
To use the authentication system, we specify it at the top of our ArticlesController in
app/controllers/articles_controller.rb. In our case, we want the user to be authenticated on every
action except index and show, so we write that:

class ArticlesController < ApplicationController

http_basic_authenticate_with name: "dhh", password: "secret", except:

[:index, :show]
def index
@articles = Article.all
end
# snipped for brevity

We also want to allow only authenticated users to delete comments, so in the CommentsController
(app/controllers/comments_controller.rb) we write:

class CommentsController < ApplicationController

http_basic_authenticate_with name: "dhh", password: "secret", only:
:destroy
def create
@article = Article.find(params[:article_id])
# ...
end
# snipped for brevity

Now if you try to create a new article, you will be greeted with a basic HTTP Authentication challenge:

Other authentication methods are available for Rails applications. Two popular authentication add-ons for
Rails are the Devise rails engine and the Authlogic gem, along with a number of others.

9.2 Other Security Considerations

Security, especially in web applications, is a broad and detailed area. Security in your Rails application is
covered in more depth in the Ruby on Rails Security Guide.

10 What's Next?
Now that you've seen your first Rails application, you should feel free to update it and experiment on your
own. But you don't have to do everything without help. As you need assistance getting up and running with
Rails, feel free to consult these support resources:
The Ruby on Rails Guides
The Ruby on Rails Tutorial
The Ruby on Rails mailing list
The #rubyonrails channel on irc.freenode.net
Rails also comes with built-in help that you can generate using the rake command-line utility:
Running rake doc:guides will put a full copy of the Rails Guides in the doc/guides folder of your
application. Open doc/guides/index.html in your web browser to explore the Guides.
Running rake doc:rails will put a full copy of the API documentation for Rails in the doc/api
folder of your application. Open doc/api/index.html in your web browser to explore the API
documentation.
To be able to generate the Rails Guides locally with the doc:guides rake task you need to install the
RedCloth and Nokogiri gems. Add it to your Gemfile and run bundle install and you're ready to go.

11 Configuration Gotchas
The easiest way to work with Rails is to store all external data as UTF-8. If you don't, Ruby libraries and
Rails will often be able to convert your native data into UTF-8, but this doesn't always work reliably, so
you're better o ensuring that all external data is UTF-8.
If you have made a mistake in this area, the most common symptom is a black diamond with a question
mark inside appearing in the browser. Another common symptom is characters like "" appearing instead
of "". Rails takes a number of internal steps to mitigate common causes of these problems that can be
automatically detected and corrected. However, if you have external data that is not stored as UTF-8, it can
occasionally result in these kinds of issues that cannot be automatically detected by Rails and corrected.
Two very common sources of data that are not UTF-8:
Your text editor: Most text editors (such as TextMate), default to saving files as UTF-8. If your text
editor does not, this can result in special characters that you enter in your templates (such as ) to
appear as a diamond with a question mark inside in the browser. This also applies to your i18n
translation files. Most editors that do not already default to UTF-8 (such as some versions of
Dreamweaver) oer a way to change the default to UTF-8. Do so.
Your database: Rails defaults to converting data from your database into UTF-8 at the boundary.
However, if your database is not using UTF-8 internally, it may not be able to store all characters
that your users enter. For instance, if your database is using Latin-1 internally, and your user enters
a Russian, Hebrew, or Japanese character, the data will be lost forever once it enters the database.
If possible, use UTF-8 as the internal storage of your database.

Feedback
You're encouraged to help improve the quality of this guide.
Please contribute if you see any typos or factual errors. To get started, you can read our documentation
contributions section.
You may also find incomplete content, or stu that is not up to date. Please do add any missing
documentation for master. Make sure to check Edge Guides first to verify if the issues are already fixed or
not on the master branch. Check the Ruby on Rails Guides Guidelines for style and conventions.
If for whatever reason you spot something to fix but cannot patch it yourself, please open an issue.
And last but not least, any kind of discussion regarding Ruby on Rails documentation is very welcome in the
rubyonrails-docs mailing list.
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