Build a Blog with Rails 7

For our very first Rails app, we're going to start very simple. We'll build a blog completely from scratch to learn routes, models, views, and controllers. Plus, we'll deploy our code to production, add migrations to improve our blog, and lastly we'll add rich text and file uploads with ActionText and ActiveStorage.

Start Series

21 Lessons | 5h 17m | Beginner

Creating a New Rails app

Apr 03, 2023

We're going to build a Blog with Ruby on Rails so let's start by making sure we have everything installed and create our new Rails app

11m

The MVC Pattern Explained

Apr 04, 2023

Rails uses the MVC Pattern. This isn't as scary as it sounds. It's basically a design architecture that gives you 3 primary buckets to help you organize your code.

20m

Rails Application Structure Explained

Apr 03, 2023

Now that we've created a new Rails app, let's take a look at the files generated and learn what they do

10m

Creating A Blog Post Model

Apr 03, 2023

The first thing we need is a database table to store our blog posts. We create a Rails model (the M in MVC) to create the database and a Ruby class for us to interact with the database table.

11m

Adding a Blog Index Action

Apr 03, 2023

An index page allows us to display all the blog posts in our database. We will learn how to setup routes that point to controllers and actions that render HTML.

16m

Adding a Blog Post Show Action

Apr 03, 2023

We need a way to view individual Blog Posts on their own URLs now. That's where our Show action comes into play and we will learn how to build that in this lesson.

Adding a New Blog Post Action

Apr 03, 2023

We now want to create new Blog Posts in our Rails app, not directly in the database. To do this, we're going to start by building a new action and form for inputting data for our Rails model.

10m

Creating New Blog Posts

Apr 03, 2023

Handling form submissions with Rails teaches us about strong parameters and saving data with our Rails models into the database.

11m

Edit & Update Blog Post Actions

Apr 03, 2023

Implementing Edit and Update actions are straightforward now. We can reuse what we've learned with New and Create and reuse some of the logic to edit and update database records in Rails.

12m

Adding a Blog Post Destroy Action and Refactoring

Apr 03, 2023

We want to be able to delete blog posts we no longer want. We'll learn how to delete blog posts and refactor our code in this lesson.

20m

Authenticating Blog Admin Pages

Apr 03, 2023

Anyone can create, edit, or delete a blog post in our Rails app currently. In this lesson, we'll add authentication so only allowed users can do those actions.

Adding TailwindCSS to Rails

Apr 03, 2023

Our blog doesn't look great. We're going to install TailwindCSS so we can easily style our Rails application however we want.

17m

Deploying our Rails Blog to Production

Apr 03, 2023

Next we're going to deploy our Rails blog application to production! This is a huge step, but also

24m

Adding Scheduled Blog Posts

Apr 03, 2023

Scheduling blog posts to be published in the future is the next feature we're going to add. In this lesson, we'll talk about several options we have to implement this and then choose one to build.

15m

Writing Tests for Scheduled Blog Posts

Apr 03, 2023

Our scheduled blog posts adds some complexity to our app. In this lesson, we're going to write some tests to make sure that our code does what we want it to do.

Sorting Blog Posts With Scopes

Apr 03, 2023

Scopes are a way for us to change the way a database table is queried. For example, we can use them to change the ordering of the results so certain records are first.

16m

Rich Text Blog Posts with ActionText

Apr 03, 2023

ActionText is a feature of Rails that allows you to add rich text including file uploads to any of your models. This is a perfect fit for our Blog Posts, so we're going to replace the text column with a rich text field with ActionText.

21m

Blog Posts with File Uploads using ActiveStorage & Amazon S3

Apr 03, 2023

ActionText builds on top of the ActiveStorage file uploads feature in Rails, so we're going to configure Amazon S3 storage so we can upload files in production

How to Upgrade Ruby Versions

Apr 05, 2023

Over time, you'll need to upgrade the Ruby version of your Rails application. For example, a new version of Ruby was released since we started this series that fixes a couple security issues in Ruby so we'll teach you how to upgrade your Ruby version.

31m

How to Add Pagination for Blog Posts in Rails

Apr 05, 2023

Pagination is something we don't need until we publish a lot of blog posts. We can use the pagy gem to add page links to the bottom of our pages and handle thousands of blog posts.

28m

Upload Cover Images in Rails with ActiveStorage

Apr 19, 2023

Blog posts often need cover images for social sharing. In this lesson, we'll add cover image file uploads with ActiveStorage.

Next Series

Finished this series? Continue learning in the next series

Build a Password Manager with Rails 7

Our second Rails application is going to be a password manager from scratch. We'll learn how to encrypt usernames and passwords in the database securely with ActiveRecord Encryption, add Javascript so we can have copy to clipboard functionality, and we'll learn how to use join tables with roles to setup permissions for other users that we want to share passwords with.

Chris Oliver

9 Lessons

2h 40m

Beginner

Start Series