Using Github’s "Atom" IDE To Develop Ruby on Rails Apps

Atom.io was released in early 2014 by Github. It was their contribution to the woefully under-developed SublimeText offering, which although was a great product, suffered from being premium-only and rarely updated. Githubs approach of open-sourcing the Atom editor was a fresh take on the work already done by Sublime.

The Atom.io editor is based on the Electron framework – a system designed to make HTML / css based applications work on native operating systems. Simply, this method that the system is able to function an executable application file with complete native capacity – hosting a NodeJS application in the backend. Not only does this give a huge amount of capacity to the system, but also allows you to install any app built with it on a range of devices.

To develop Ruby on Rails applications with Atom.io, you need several things set up. Firstly, you need to make sure you have a working Ruby installation. Once this is in place, you also need to ensure you can install the Rails gem on top of it. If youre able to do this, youll then be able to start developing RoR applications – which is where Atom.io comes in.

To develop a RoR application, you need to initialize rails in a directory of your choice. To do this, open the CMD / Bash command prompt and kind rails new [[app name]]. This will initialize all the necessary files inside the directory. From this, youre then able to then run the Rails server (rails s) which will allow you to send and receive requests to the app from the browser.

From this point, youll be able to use Atom to edit any of the files required to make your application work. Since Ruby on Rails works on an MVC (form View Controller) programming pattern, you will need to create a route, controller action and view for any URL you wish to show to the user. To edit the routes, you can edit config/routes.rb and then add a corresponding controller action in app/controllers/your_controller.rb.

The main thing to consider with Atom is the way in which its able to add additional packages to aid with development. To do this, youd be best browsing the GitHub Atom website and see any of the possible packages you wish to download – allowing you to upgrade the experience of your system.