1. Go to https://gist.github.com/ (I hope you’re already signed in github)
2. Add description and paste your code snippet into the text editor
3. Click “Create Public Gist”
4. From here, don’t use the given embed code because Medium smart enough to recognize the Gist URL
5. Copy the URL of the Gist and paste it in as an embed link

Thanks for reading :)

What is a server?

A server is a computer that is used to host a website or service. This is where the application code actually “lives” — all the little 1s and 0s that make a computer program what it is are being stored on a real computer. There are virtual computers that act as servers, as well as material computers that allows the physical data to be stored somewhere.

Server Space for Hire

Google (via Google Cloud Platform), Amazon (via AWS CloudFormation) and other data companies off server space for rent, which allows for easy set up of what is being called a cloud — a very cute name for a server connected to the internet. These companies house hardware (computers) that are storing software and sharing it on the web. When a user rents cloud space, the company providing the service blocks off a portion of its supercomputer and dedicates it to storing the code programs for each user client.

Use your personal computer as server with your computer’s IP address to share your localhost:3000 rails applications with other computers on your wifi.

Before deploying a program on the web using whichever host fits the project, it is possible to run the application in a browser using the computer’s internal server without deploying it to the internet. We do this by running rails s in the terminal.

rails s allows for the computer that the program is written on to host the program being run. This can be shared with other computers by creating a small virtual computer that functions as a server. This can be useful when you want to run the application on multiple computers in your network, for testing or demonstrative purposes. You can share the application with your phone in the same way, to test on mobile.

Simple execution:

1) On the primary computer (the server) find the IP by going to network preferences.

Check out the screenshot below to see where you will find this number.

2) On the secondary computer replace localhost in the browser bar with the primary computer IP address. Using the example from the screenshot one would write 192.168.6.223:3000

Those are all the steps! Share you first-phase rails app with anyone in your network this way.

Each program keeps track of its gem dependencies in a file called gemfile. If there is a gem we need to include in our program, we must record that in the gemfile.

Without Bundler, running the application on a new machine would require individual installation of each gem. Bundler checks the gemfile, gets the code from each gem, and incorporates it into our program with the simple terminal command bundle.

How does bundler get installed?

Being a gem itself, Bundler does need to be installed and it doesn’t magically install itself — you have to write `gem install bundler` to get the bundler going. Bundler has been considered so relevant that Ruby 2.6 is going to have bundler included already, so no need to install it separately.

Keep using bundle to incorporate all of your gem dependencies in the most quick and easy way, and appreciate the efficiency this gem allows us in our coding adventures.

What is ActiveRecord

ActiveRecord is a gem (Ruby library) that provides Object Relational Mapping (ORM) to our Ruby codebase using inheritance. Object Relational Mapping is when you are relating elements in a data spreadsheet to elements of a Ruby program. Each row of the spreadsheet is made into a Ruby object, and you can also take a Ruby object and insert it as row into the spreadsheet. ActiveRecord also abstracts the methods that we use to represent many-to-many in our Ruby classes.

Many-to-many relationships are a staple in all code languages and Ruby is no exception. Let’s take a classic three-model many-to-many relationship and look at the methods we use to illustrate them. We are going to use the classes of restaurants, customers and restaurant reviews in our example, where restaurant has many reviews and customer has many reviews, creating a many-to-many relationship between customer and restaurant through reviews.

As the join table, the Review class is initialized with an instance of a restaurant and an instance of a customer. Restaurant class has two methods, one linking it to the Review class and one linking it to Customer class through reviews. Customers has similar two methods, one linking it to Review class and another linking it to Restaurant class through reviews.

ActiveRecord abstracts these six methods into a few lines of code using belongs_to and has_many :through methods.

In these examples, ActiveRecord acts as a superclass and allows you to inherit traits into your program, including has_many , belongs_to and has_many: :through relationships. ActiveRecord has many use cases for our Ruby codebase and replacing join methods is just one of them.

Does anyone want to sketch out the relationship between ActiveRecord and Ruby code improvements? I was thinking has_many through: code_snippets, or has_many through: data pieces.

Comment your thoughts below.