Using Scaffold in Ruby on Rails

3 min readApr 1, 2021

Introduction

We’ve all been there. Wasting copious amounts of time setting up the seemingly endless rails files just to find out something is terribly wrong. Now introducing the scaffold command. Once you’re in the correct directory you can slap this command into your terminal:

rails g scaffold name_of_file attribute1 attribute2 attribute3

This command will generate:

Controllers
Models
Routes
Test-related files
Filled out views(including forms)

Keep in mind that if you make a mistake you can replace the “g” that stands for “generate” for a d for destroy. This will destroy all the files created by the original generate command. In this case i’ll be using the following command.

rails g scaffold car make:string model:string year:string

Model

Tables

Controller

Views and Forms

Checking Routes

As you can see scaffold has created so many of the things that took us quite a while one by one. If we run rails routes in the terminal we can see the routes created for us as well.

Migrating and Seeding

Before running “rails s” to check out our local host we must first migrate our new created tables. I’ve seeded the database with some dummy data for testing.