Lesson: run the blacklight generator

This lesson is known to work with hydra-head version 6.0.0.
Please update this wiki to reflect any other versions that have been tested.

Goals

• Add Blacklight functionality to your Rails Application

Explanation

Hydra builds on and extends the features provided by Blacklight, so it's important that we first put those Blacklight features into our application. To do this, we run the custom Rails generator provided by Blacklight. The generator creates a number of files in your application that will allow you to use and modify Blacklight's features in your application.

Tip: If you want to see clearly what changes that the generator has made, make sure that before you run the generator all of your current changes have been checked into git -- so before running the generator running 'git status' should report that there are no changes ("nothing to commit"). Then when you run the generator you will be able to see all of the changes it's made by runing 'git status'.

Steps

Note: You must have completed the steps in Lesson: Add the Hydra Dependencies in order for the following steps to work.

Step 1: Run the code generator provided by the Blacklight gem.

We do this by typing

$> rails generate blacklight --devise

The --devise flag tells the generator to install the devise gem, which takes care of authentication.

The blacklight generator has created a few database migrations that store users, saved searches and bookmarks. Additionally, it's installed the devise gem and the bootstrap gem. It's created an important file in our application app/controllers/catalog_controller.rb. This is the primary place where you configure the blacklight search.

Step 2: Run the generated database migrations

At this point we should run the migrations, so that the database tables are built. To do this enter the following command:

$> rake db:migrate

Next Step

Go on to Lesson: Run the Hydra-Head generator or return to the Dive into Hydra page.