1. Project Setup

Welcome to the Plutonium tutorial! In this guide, we'll build a complete blog application from scratch.

First, let's get a new Rails application up and running with Plutonium installed.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure you have the following installed:

• Ruby 3.2.2 or higher
• Rails 7.1 or higher
• Node.js and Yarn

If you're new to Rails, we highly recommend the official Rails Getting Started Guide first.

Create a New Rails App

We'll use the Plutonium Rails template to create a new application. This is the fastest way to get started.

Open your terminal and run the following command:

rails new plutonium_blog -a propshaft -j esbuild -c tailwind \
  -m https://radioactive-labs.github.io/plutonium-core/templates/plutonium.rb

This command creates a new Rails app named plutonium_blog and configures it with:

• propshaft for assets
• esbuild for JavaScript bundling
• TailwindCSS for styling
• The base Plutonium gem and configurations

Explore the Project

Once the command finishes, navigate into your new project's directory:

cd plutonium_blog

The installer has already set up the core files you need. Here are the most important ones for now:

plutonium_blog/
├── app/
│   ├── controllers/
│   │   ├── plutonium_controller.rb # Base controller for Plutonium
│   │   └── resource_controller.rb  # Base for all resource controllers
│   └── views/
│       └── layouts/
│           └── resource.html.erb   # Default layout for Plutonium views
├── config/
│   ├── initializers/
│   │   └── plutonium.rb           # Main Plutonium configuration
│   └── packages.rb                # How custom packages are loaded
└── packages/                      # Where you'll build your features
    └── .keep

Start the Server

Let's boot up the Rails server to make sure everything is working correctly.

rails server

Open your web browser and navigate to http://localhost:3000. You should see the default Rails welcome page.

Next Steps

Congratulations! You have a fresh Plutonium application ready to go.

In the next chapter, we'll create our first Feature Package to house all the logic for our blog.