Question

I’m trying to create a Rails app without a persistence layer (ActiveRecord, MongoMapper, etc). I’ve used --skip-active-record on rails new nice_app. This has changed the config/application.rb, but when I try to create new “model” with Rails generate – rails g model nice_class – it fail like a noob with:

No value provided for required options ‘–orm’

So, if I skip ActiveRecord I can’t use Rails generators ?

Answer 1

Note the tasks that get called when you run rails g model nice_class:

  invoke  active_record
  create    db/migrate/20111227183458_create_nice_classes.rb
  create    app/models/nice_class.rb
  invoke    rspec
  create      spec/models/nice_class_spec.rb

The first thing you notice, is that it’s using ActiveRecord to generate the model. Besides that, though, it’s not doing a lot: creates a file in the migrations folder (which you don’t need), another file in the model folder (which you do need), and a file in the test or spec folder (which you ‘should’ need). You can make these yourself if you want want, they are pretty close to being empty anyway.

For specifics about models not based on ActiveRecord, take a look at Ryan Bates’ “Tableless Models” Railscast available here: http://railscasts.com/episodes/193-tableless-model.

If you are going to be making these kinds of non-ActiveRecord models a lot, you can write your own generator that does exactly what you want.

Best of luck.