Learning Rails - Routes Not Working in My First Tutorial

Question

I hope everyone is having a great day. In my pursuit of knowledge, I've ran into a huge stumbling block.

I'm following this tutorial. I'm using the most up to date everything, I think he is in rails 4 and I'm in rails 5.

https://youtu.be/GY7Ps8fqGdc?t=703

By no means is watching the tutorial necessary to understand my question. Right where I linked, the only thing he has done besides generate a simple rails app, is generate a controller like this:

rails generate controller welcome index

Then right where I linked into the video, he goes into the routes file and uncomments a line that isn't present in my rails app, so I just wrote it by hand

root 'welcome#index'

And it fails when I try to load localhost:3000, throwing a jsexception "TypeError: Object doesn't support this property or method"

Is there some functionality that has been deprecated or something? Why isn't this working? I've done the tutorial up to where I've linked at least 5 times. I have tried very hard to resolve this with no avail.

Oh, and before someone tells me you shouldn't route like that, I've read that before, but he's just trying to get the viewers to the point where they can execute ruby code on a web page, he covers routing in detail later, but I can't get there without beating this because the lesson relies on me getting this first.

Please, oh great forum, grace me with some answer and I will imbue you with an upvote and great thanks.

Also, on a side note, if anyone could recommend learning resources that have helped you get past beginner with this framework, I'd be happy to accept advice in addition to this question being answered.

EDIT: to include requested information

the routes.rb file

Rails.application.routes.draw do
  get 'sausage/tuna'
  root 'sausage#tuna'
end

One last piece of information, probably obvious, I call my things funny names so the generic "welcome" and "index" don't confuse me. I draw inspiration from the new boston and called mine 'sausage tuna' instead of 'welcome index'.

Thanks again for helping me out. I really want to learn this.

Answer 1

Ok the problem seems to come from ExecJS, which is basically the gem that deals with JS within Ruby.

The offending line is : <%= stylesheet_link_tag 'application', media: 'all' %> (as you can see I am missing the turbolinks bit because I am not using turbolinks)

What this means? Basically this line is for a dedicated sheet of JS code attached to this page.

where is this code located ? In application.html.erb. application.html.erbis the default view layout. It means that every view triggered by your code inherits from this 'master' view.

So basicaly your routing is good if the error goes to this stage. Your Sausage#tuna action is triggered and then the `tuna.html.erb" view is rendered but with an error on this master view.

Basically because you have an error on application.html.erb, you will get the same error for every action of any controller and every view triggered.

Now what the problem ? Well I never encoutered this error but skipping coffee seems to solve your problem. Though in my case I have gem 'coffee-rails' and some of my JS files are actually "coffee.erb" files and I don't get the same error. So i guess it is kinda more complex than this..

But in order for you to understand Rails better , this line, as I said earlier, is compiling some JS and attaching it to the master view file (then to every view of your application)

Now if you want to know what JS will be compiled into this separate sheet, looks at the file app/assets/javascrips/application.js.

You should get something like :

// This is a manifest file that'll be compiled into application.js, which will include all the files
// listed below.
//
// Any JavaScript/Coffee file within this directory, lib/assets/javascripts, vendor/assets/javascripts,
// or any plugin's vendor/assets/javascripts directory can be referenced here using a relative path.
//
// It's not advisable to add code directly here, but if you do, it'll appear at the bottom of the
// compiled file.
//
// Read Sprockets README (https://github.com/rails/sprockets#sprockets-directives) for details
// about supported directives.
//
//= require jquery3
//= require jquery_ujs
//= require bootstrap
//= require cable
//= require rails.validations
//= require footer.js
//= require serviceworker-companion

Everything looks like it is commented out, but actually the last lines with //= require are actually gathering some JS from different gems. (Jquery, ...)

In my case : Jquery, Bootstrap, actioncable .. which is the Js I need on every page of my app...

Regarding your question about a good tutorial, the one I prefer is the getting started tutorial on Rails website : https://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html

EDIT

My mistake. It is the stylesheet that creates a problem. Which I am even less sure what could cause this because ExecJS is dealing the Js code in your app, not the CSS. The stylesheet work exactly the same as said above for application.js. It links some CSS stylesheets to every of your application pages.

Here is mine app/assets/stylesheets/application.css

/*
 * This is a manifest file that'll be compiled into application.css, which will include all the files
 * listed below.
 *
 * Any CSS and SCSS file within this directory, lib/assets/stylesheets, vendor/assets/stylesheets,
 * or any plugin's vendor/assets/stylesheets directory can be referenced here using a relative path.
 *
 * You're free to add application-wide styles to this file and they'll appear at the bottom of the
 * compiled file so the styles you add here take precedence over styles defined in any styles
 * defined in the other CSS/SCSS files in this directory. It is generally better to create a new
 * file per style scope.
 *
 *= require navbars.css.scss
 *= require footer.css.scss
 *= require cookiewarning.css.scss
 *= require_self
 */

@import "bootstrap-sprockets";
@import "bootstrap";

As you can see, there is the navbar css and the footer css plus some other CSS that appends on everypage of my app.

(And thanks for accepting my answer as the answer but it is definitely not, just wanted to explain you what were things doing :) )

Answer 2

For anyone experiencing this issue, reinstalling node seemed to solve my problem.