3. Defining Resources

With our Blogging package ready, we can now define the core Resources of our feature: Post and Comment. But first, we need a way to represent users, since posts and comments will belong to a user.

Setting Up Users and Authentication

Plutonium provides generators to quickly set up user authentication using the popular Rodauth library.

Run the following commands in your terminal:

# 1. Install Rodauth configuration
rails generate pu:rodauth:install

# 2. Generate a User model and authentication logic
rails generate pu:rodauth:account user

# 3. Run the database migrations
rails db:migrate

This is a huge time-saver! It creates:

• A User model (app/models/user.rb).
• Database migrations for the users table.
• All the necessary authentication logic (login, logout, sign up, password reset, etc.).

Now that we have a User model, we can create our blog-specific resources.

Scaffolding the Post Resource

A Resource in Plutonium is more than just a model; it's a combination of the model, its definition (how it's displayed), and its policy (who can do what).

Let's scaffold our Post resource. It will have a title, some text content, and will belong to a User.

rails generate pu:res:scaffold Post user:belongs_to title:string content:text 'published_at:datetime?'

The generator will prompt you to choose which package this resource belongs to. Select blogging.

This command generates several important files inside your packages/blogging directory:

• app/models/blogging/post.rb: The ActiveRecord model.
• app/definitions/blogging/post_definition.rb: The resource definition for UI.
• app/policies/blogging/post_policy.rb: The authorization policy.
• A database migration to create the blogging_posts table.

Let's look at the generated model at packages/blogging/app/models/blogging/post.rb:

# packages/blogging/app/models/blogging/post.rb
class Blogging::Post < Blogging::ResourceRecord
  belongs_to :user
  validates :title, presence: true
  validates :content, presence: true
end

Notice it's correctly namespaced under Blogging and associated with the User model.

Before we continue, run the migration to update your database:

rails db:migrate

Scaffolding the Comment Resource

Now, let's do the same for Comment. A comment will belong to a User and a Post.

rails generate pu:res:scaffold Comment user:belongs_to blogging/post:belongs_to body:text

Again, select the blogging package when prompted.

Namespaced Associations

Notice that we used blogging/post to specify the association. Plutonium's generators understand this and will correctly create the namespaced Blogging::Post association.

This generates the model, definition, policy, and migration for comments.

Run the migration for comments:

rails db:migrate

Next Steps

We've now set up users, authentication, and the core Post and Comment resources for our blog. However, there's no way to interact with them yet.

In the next chapter, we'll create a Portal to provide a web interface for managing our new resources.