how to set up a new rails program

Question

I've heard a lot about rails, what is it and how does it work?

Answer 1

To start a new rails project after having it installed, it's quite easy.

rails <project name>

I'd recommend that you start by reading the rails guides, the first one being getting started with rails.
It'll explain you all the basics to start programming in Ruby with Rails.

Answer 2

Rails is a web application framework.

To be precise, it's a generative framework - meaning that it has tools that generate templated code and a templated project setup.

Getting started

After you've installed ruby (the language), rubygems (the ruby package management system) and rails (the web framework), you can just type rails helloworldapp and rails will generate a skeleton project in a new subdirectory called helloworldapp. To run the app, just move to the helloworldapp directory and type ruby script/server and you should get a minimal app running locally on port 3000.

It works well because you have almost zero plumbing to do to get a new project working - unlike the configuration nightmare of most Java frameworks.

Download it and install it using the instructions here: http://rubyonrails.org/

Try following this tutorial: http://guides.rails.info/getting%5Fstarted.html