Rails Companion

How to Setup Rails-like Integration Tests in Ruby

In this next post in the Rails Companion series, we'll add support for integration testing to our Ruby web application. Specifically, we'll set up the Minitest framework and simulate HTTP requests using the rack-test gem. Finally, we'll add some syntactic sugar to make our tests just like Rails.

Build Your Own Router in Ruby

Have you always wondered what a Router is and how it works? I know I have. In this second bonus post in my Rails Companion course, we'll build our own router in Ruby to get a deeper understanding of the Rails Router. We'll also use some meta-programming to make it look just like the Rails router.

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Let's Build a Web Application in Ruby without Rails

Rails is great for building web apps. But it can be quite overwhelming if you don't know how web applications work. In this series of articles, we'll build a simple but complete app in plain Ruby without Rails, to get a deeper understanding and appreciation of everything Rails does for us.

Rails Middleware: (Almost) Everything You Need to Know

In this post, we'll learn almost everything about Rails middleware: what it is, why we need it, how it works, and why it's so important. We'll also learn how to create and test custom middleware in a Rails app. Finally, we'll extract logging functionality in its own middleware in a simple web app.

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Logging in Ruby: (Almost) Everything You Need to Know

Like backups, logging is one of those topics that seems unnecessary until something goes wrong! It's very frustrating to fix a bug that's only reproducible in production without having any logs to help you debug it. This post covers the basics of logging in Ruby and adds logging to our no-rails app.

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How to Implement Rails-like Dynamic Views in Ruby

In this article, we will learn 'one' way to implement the controller-to-view data handoff using instance variables, just like Rails, and following the same conventions as Rails. Although it's a highly simplified implementation to keep things simple, I hope you'll find it fun and learn something new.

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Implementing Rails-like Controllers in a No-Rails App

In its essence, a controller class in Rails is a coordinator. It accepts the incoming HTTP request and builds the data required by the view using the domain models. This post shows a highly simplified implementation of the controller pattern for a better understanding of Rails controllers.

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Serving Static Files in Ruby

This is the fourth article in the series where we build a simple, yet complete web app in plain Ruby, without using Rails to better understand how Rails works. In this article, we'll learn how to serve static files in plain Ruby, without using Rails.

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