Question

I’m getting started with Ruby on Rails and am following an online tutorial. The tutorial had me modify my routes.rb file by adding the following line:

resources :people

I also typed in rails generate controller People previously. controllers/people_controllers.rb looks like this:

class PeopleController < ApplicationController
end

Everything looks good to me. However, http://0.0.0.0:3000/people gives me an error:

Unknown action
The action 'index' could not be found for PeopleController

I don’t think I should need to do this, but when I add:

def index
end

to my controller, and refresh the page, I get the following error instead:

 Template is missing

Missing template people/index, application/index with {:handlers=>[:erb, :builder], :locale=>[:en, :en], :formats=>[:html]}. Searched in: * "/Users/myuser/projects/project_manager/app/views" 

I’m using the newest version of Ruby, and Rails v3. Everything was installed today. What could be wrong here?

Answer 1

You’ve created the controller but not defined the view for it. Add a file called index.html.erb in directory app/views/people.

Alternatively you can re-run the controller generator to generate the index view:

rails g controller People index 

Also it is a good idea to read the Rails Guides. For your understanding of views and rendering read this.