Lesson: start the application & search for results

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

• Start and Stop a local "development" copy of the application
• Remove the default Welcome page provided by Rails
• Run a Search in Blacklight through your browser

Steps

Step 1: Start the Rails server

Now, let's see our model on the web. You can start 'webrick', a development server that comes with rails by typing:

$> rails server

Leave that terminal window open. It will print info whenever the server does anything. You will return to this window when you want to stop or restart the server.

Step 2: Look at the application in your Browser

Now you can visit your local copy of the application with a web browser when you point the browser at http://localhost:3000/

If it worked you should see a page with the text: "Welcome aboard. You’re riding Ruby on Rails!". This is the default page, but now that we know it works, we can delete it.

Step 3: Remove the Rails default "Welcome" page

Open a new terminal (so we can keep the server running) and type:

$> rm public/index.html

Then reload the page at http://localhost:3000/.

Step 4: Run a Search

Now that you've removed the default "Welcome" page and reloaded the page in your browser, you should see something that looks like a default Blacklight install. If you enter a search query you don't see any results because we haven't created any objects yet -- your Solr index is empty.

In the next step we will create a Book object that will then show up in your search results.

Next Step

Go on to Lesson: Build a Book Model or return to the Dive into Hydra page.