Creating an Empty Rails Web Application

Rails is both a runtime web application framework and a set of helper scripts that automate many of the things you do when developing a web application. In this step, we will use one such helper script to create the entire directory structure and the initial set of files to start our Library System application.

• Go into ruby installation directory to create your application.
• Run the following command to create a skeleton for library application. It will create the directory structure in the current directory.

tp> rails new library

This will create a subdirectory for the library application containing a complete directory tree of folders and files for an empty Rails application. Check a complete directory structure of the application. Check Rails Directory Structure for more detail.
Most of our development work will be creating and editing files in the library/app subdirectories. Here's a quick run down of how to use them −

• The controllers subdirectory is where Rails looks to find controller classes. A controller handles a web request from the user.
• The views subdirectory holds the display templates to fill in with data from our application, convert to HTML, and return to the user's browser.
• The models subdirectory holds the classes that model and wrap the data stored in our application's database. In most frameworks, this part of the application can grow pretty messy, tedious, verbose, and error-prone. Rails makes it dead simple.
• The helpers subdirectory holds any helper classes used to assist the model, view, and controller classes. This helps to keep the model, view, and controller code small, focused, and uncluttered.