Welcome to Aptana RadRails

Aptana RadRails provides a rich and powerful user interface for creating Ruby on Rails applications. You can create projects, edit them with ease, and debug them with a variety of tools. RadRails ships with an embedded jRuby interpreter ready to go, or you can configure it to use an external Rails installation.

Getting Started

Below is a short introduction to using the functionality of Aptana RadRails.

Creating a simple application

  1. Make sure this project is selected in the Ruby Explorer view, and select the Generators view at the bottom of the screen.
  2. Select scaffold from the dropdown, and type in or copy/paste the following:
    recipe title:string author:string description:text
  3. Press Go. Rails will create a complete skeleton application including form entry fields and a database schema based on the above information.
  4. Once it has finished writing information to the console, go to the Rake Tasks view and choose db:migrate. Press Go.
  5. This populates the database with an empty recipe table.
  6. Once that has finished, click here (note the url it created) to start populating data. Enter a few records.
  7. If you lose this tab, you can re-launch your application from the Run button in the top toolbar. Click on the arrow to the right-hand side of the button to launch the web browser again.

Viewing your data

Go to to Window > Open Perspective > Data. Make sure the Data Navigator view is selected. You can expand out the data navigator tree for your project and view the data in the tables.

Viewing your server

Click on the Servers view in order to stop and restart your internal Rails server.

Customizing your Application

You can begin editing the files under app/views to edit the template pages of your application. For further customization options and more advanced topics, see the RadRails documentation. Key file locations:

  1. /config/database.yml: your database configuration
  2. /db/schema.db: your database schema
  3. /public: the root of your web site (including the location of this file)