[l8nite]

I don’t know a great “how to lay out” guide off-hand, but I’ll take a stab at helping with the confusion.

Rake is a Ruby equivalent of Make. Many Ruby gems will include rake tasks (Makefile targets) that can be used to drive pieces of an application. Most of the time your test framework of choice (rspec typically) will include “rake test” as a target for running the tests.

The tests usually live in a folder named “spec”, while application code lives in “lib” and your driver code lives in “bin” or just a top-level file… without some of the Rails initialization glue, you’ll have to do a little work to require files via relative paths or set up the $LOAD_PATH variable, etc.

Bundler is the package manager, and you’ll often see commands like “bundle exec rake”, this is similar in spirit to a virtualenv. Bundler will use the libraries defined in your Gemfile to run the given program (in this case, ‘rake’). The command “bundle” will read the Gemfile and resolve dependencies to concrete versions of libraries and write out a Gemfile.lock for you with all the versions explicitly defined.

For debugging, there are a number of tools out there, but I’m partial to ‘pry’. You add pry to your Gemfile, require it, and then can add a breakpoint by putting a call to “binding.pry” in your source code wherever. This will drop you into a REPL within the context of the program at that point.

pry is useful, but there are some other gems and settings files out there that can make it a little friendlier, pry-byebug comes to mind as having saner keyboard shortcuts iirc.

If you need help with overall file system layout, etc, the best place to look is going to be existing trivial gems on rubygems.org. Granted these will have a couple of minor differences from a “plain” application because they’re packaging as a library (*.gemspec file instead of Gemfile, and usually has a version.rb file somewhere).

[dysoco]

Thanks for the awesome reply! This has been really useful, I was mostly confused about bundle/rake now I understand most of the things to through rake but bundle just provides the env, makes sense.

Also I created a project with bundle, which gave me some structure, and downloaded Rubymine which is helping a lot as well, even if it's a tiny project, also it suggests me new cool things Ruby can do which I had not idea about.