Sample Rails App: Book Club

This is a partial Rails application that has limited features. But use it as a reference.

Project Setup

Please make these changes to your Rails project BEFORE you made any code change. Make sure you RESTART your Rails server after making these changes.

How to use SCSS files?

You can just treat them as regular css files. You can change your Sublime setting at the lower right corner to view the .scss files as CSS. Then you can enjoy the CSS syntax highlighting.

Disable CoffeeScript

Do the following:

1. Comment out gem 'coffee-rails', '~> 4.1.0' in your GemFile.
2. Run bundle install.
3. If there are .coffee files already generated in your app/assets/javascripts folder, you can simply rename them to .js.

After you have made these changes, rails g controller will generate .js files instead of the default .coffee for each controller you create.

How to integrate the twitter-bootstrap-rails gem?

Let's just do the simple installation for now. For more information, please check out the github page of the gem.

1. Add gem "twitter-bootstrap-rails" in your Gemfile.
2. Run bundle install.
3. Run rails generate bootstrap:install static --no-coffeescript

The last command will do 3 things:

1. Update app/assets/stylesheets/application.css.
2. Create app/assets/stylesheets/bootstrap_and_overrides.css.
3. Create app/javascripts/bootstrap.js.

How to integrate the font-awesome-rails gem?

The steps are quite simple. Check out the github page of the gem if you are interested.

1. Add gem "font-awesome-rails" in your Gemfile.
2. Run bundle install.
3. Add the following line to your application.css. Refer to the sample code if you are not sure where you should add this line.

    *= require font-awesome
   

How to integrate the momentjs-rails gem?

You should start seeing the pattern by now. This is the gem's github page if you want to take a look.

1. Add gem "momentjs-rails" in your Gemfile.
2. Run bundle install.
3. Add the following line to your application.js. Refer to the same code if you are not sure where you should add this line.

   //= require moment
   

Update ApplicationController to disable authentication

In the app/controllers/application_controller.rb file, you can do this to ensure that the FIRST user from your users table is always the current user.

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  # Prevent CSRF attacks by raising an exception.
  # For APIs, you may want to use :null_session instead.
  #protect_from_forgery with: :exception

  # Just use default (:null_session) for this super simple app
  protect_from_forgery

  before_action :set_current_user

  private
 
  def set_current_user
    @current_user = User.find(1)
  end
end

You can use @current_user in ANY html.erb page, for example:

Welcome back, <%=@current_user.first_name%>!!<br/>

How to use jQuery?

In the sample code, if you need to use jQuery in any of the view pages generated for the HomeController under the app/views/home/ folder, you should write the jQuery code in home.js.

Likewise, for the views pages generated for the ReviewsController under the app/views/reviews/ folder, you should write the jQuery code in reviews.js.

You can refer to these files in the sample:

   app/views/home/main.html.erb
   app/assets/javascripts/home.js
   app/views/reviews/index.html.erb
   app/assets/javascripts/reviews.js

Still doesn't work?

Compare these key files to the sample code and see if there are any differences:

• app/assets/javascripts/application.js
• app/assets/stylesheets/application.css
• app/assets/stylesheets/bootstrap_and_overrides.css
• app/controllers/application_controller.rb

Paperclip gem integration

0. Install ImageMagick

Make sure you have ImageMagick installed. ImageMagick is a library that allow us to resize images in the server and do different kinds of image processing (black&white, transparencies, etc)

$ brew install imagemagick

1. Add paperclip gem

Open Gemfile and add this line at the end.

gem 'paperclip', '~> 4.3'

Then run bundle install.

2. Create migration files

Next we need to create a migration to add an image attribute to the Book model. First we need to generate the migration file:

$ rails g migration add_image_to_books

Then we should update the migration file and add one line in the change method:

class AddImageToBooks < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    add_attachment :books, :image
  end
end

And now we can do rake db:migrate.

3. Configure Paperclip in Book model

In app/models/book.rb, add the following the lines of code underneath ### New Code ###:

class Book < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :reviews
  has_many :users, through: :reviews

  ### New Code ###

  has_attached_file :image, styles: {
    medium: "300x300>",
    thumb: "100x100>"
  }

  validates_attachment_content_type :image, content_type: /\Aimage\/.*\Z/
end

4. Allow image param in Books controller

In the BooksController, we need to add :image as a whitelisted parameter inside the book_params method.

class BooksController < ApplicationController
  #
  # Code now shown
  #

  private

  def book_params
    params.require(:book).permit(:title, :url, :author, :isbn, :image)
  end
end

5. Add image form field in views

In app/views/books/_form.html.erb, update the form_for helper like this:

<%= form_for @book, html: { multipart: true} do |f| %>

And then, add a new field to the form:

  <div class="field">
    <%= f.label :image %><br>
    <%= f.file_field :image %>
  </div>

Finally, in app/views/home/main.html.erb, change the code that display the book image with these

  <a href="<%=new_book_review_path(book)%>">
    <img class="thumbnail" src="<%=book.url.empty? ? burl(:medium) : book.url %>">
  </a>

6. Restart Rails Server

Before we test the image uploading, please make sure you have restarted your Rails server.

Have fun!!