Question

So I have this idea for a RubyGem that I think would be an awesome experience to learn more about Ruby and Rails but…I have no idea where to start.

My idea is to generate a folder “articles” where you can put markdown files. From this folder the main blog page displays only the titles as links to the articles themselves.

It sounds simple but I honestly have no idea where to start. What articles do you recommend I read if I want to insert lines into routes.rb, generate a folder and display markdown in Rails?

Answer 1

I would recommend one of these tutorials for gem creation:

• http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/ruby/gem-creation-with-bundler/
• http://railscasts.com/episodes/245-new-gem-with-bundler

To modify the routes.rb file, you’ll just need File.open to read lines in. Use regular expressions to determine where you want to insert your line, and write the file back out.

To create a folder, look at the documentation for Dir.new

For Markdown in Ruby/Rails, I like the rdiscount gem: https://github.com/rtomayko/rdiscount

Railties provide a nice way to do certain things like this. You’ll probably use http://api.rubyonrails.org quite a bit. There is some Railtie documentation on that site here: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/Rails/Railtie.html.