Rails Scaffold

In my bootcamp scaffold was the boogieman that slept under the bed of every instructor. It was a complete nonentity in our course, and an anathema to the teaching process. Once I finished the course, I began to wonder why.

Rails g scaffold is among the more powerful and immediate tools available to a Rails developer. It allows a dev to create in minutes a rich set of features that would take a Java developer operating outside a framework weeks to set up. So what exactly does it do for you? In short, scaffold gives you: a model, migrations, views, controllers, stylesheets, sets up routes, and more.

For example, if you wanted to create a Blog resource, all you would need to do is enter this in your terminal:

The resource come ready with full CRUD, so devs are ready to hit the ground running. At this point, the rails app has (extremely) basic functionality for this model. This means you could visit the route <your-domain>/blogs/new and actually see a basic page where you can create a new blog post. The same goes for all the basic CRUD routes.

That all sounds great! So what’s the downside? The main reason scaffold, and Rails in general, isn’t the ubiquitous forces it might be is that this convenience comes with a real cost. The cost is that there often ends up being a ton of code generated that is not useful or necessary for the project. It also makes the process SO easy that new developers might not even learn what’s really going on with Rails, or how to control it. This makes their knowledge extremely brittle. So, in reality, it’s probably best to build much of this with more basic generators, in order to keep a handle on your overhead. But for some cases where you need to move extremely quickly, like a hackaton, there’s nothing quite like rails g scaffold.

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