First Steps: Learn Building a Ruby on Rails App

The primary objective is to create a Rails app that utilizes best practices. We’ll build “Choose For Me” — an application for selecting movies, food, or entertainment options.

Getting Started

Initialize the project with:

rails new choose_for_me

Architecture: MVC

The application follows the standard MVC architecture with two primary models:

User Model

Uses the Devise gem for authentication, providing registration, login, and session management out of the box.

Topic Model

Stores entertainment options with attributes like title, rating, and type. Uses Single Table Inheritance (STI) with subclasses: Topic::Movie, Topic::Book, and Topic::Food.

Associations

The many-to-many relationship between Users and Topics is managed through a Rejection join table. This tracks which suggestions a user has already dismissed, ensuring they see fresh options.

Key Features

• Faker gem for generating realistic seed data
• Route scoping for organized, RESTful URLs
• Rails scopes for readable query shortcuts
• Randomization method that selects from available options while excluding previously rejected suggestions
• Tailwind CSS for modern, responsive styling

Conclusion

Building this application demonstrates Rails best practices including proper use of associations, STI, scopes, and authentication. These patterns form the foundation for any production Rails application.