Ruby on rails how to connect a script with a button

Question

So i have a completely new ruby on rails app just made and i added a button with bootstrap. picture. I also have a simple script that prints out "hello".

simple.rb, which is in app/scripts/simple.rb

puts "hello"

Now can someone please explain and give me an example of how can i connect the script to the button i have. So when i click the button on the website, it does what the script is told to do. I have been searching for a full day and found that maybe i need to create a new controller/view/route for it? or "require 'file' ". Correct me if im wrong, thank you!

Answer 1

You will need to follow four steps in order to reach your 'script'. First of all I recomend you to read about Rails services pattern for a better practice. In my vision it fit your necessities.

Step by step:

Create a controller to handle the request

With a simple shell command you can create a controller. Access the project folder and type something like (see shell commands for better understanding):

rails g controller hello

So now you will have a new controller called 'HelloController' inside controller's folder (app/controllers/hello_controller.rb). You can check it out and notice it have no methods. First create a method (bellow I've done one called index) for later run your service (that will contain your script). So you have a controller like:

class HelloController < ApplicationController
  def index
    # Your service goes here
  end
end

---

Create a router rule to foward the request to created controller

Access your config/routes.rb file and add to it the following line:

resources :hello, only: %i[index]

If you want to understand more about Rails routing DSL you can check it out here.

---

Create the service

To create the specified service in order to run your so-desired script, I recommend you to follow the instructions given by Amin Shah. No reason to repeat what he said.

Update view

Now you just have to create a link to perform a GET request to your created route. You can use Rails link_to helper. Something like:

<%= link_to "Button", hello_index_path, class: "btn btn-primary" %>