Create a new Rails 7 app with Tailwind

In this post we are going to briefly go over how we create a new Rails 7 app.

Since this tutorial is for Rails 7 with Tailwind, the command I’m going to recommend is

rails new APP_NAME --css tailwind -d postgresql

• rails is the Rails CLI (command line interface) tool
• new tells the Rails CLI that we want to generate a new application
• APP_NAME is, well, your app name
• --css tailwind is an optional parameter that tells Rails we want to use Tailwind for styles
• -d postgresql is an optional parameter that tells Rails we want to use the PostgreSQL to persist our data

I normally always override the default SQLite database, this is just a personal preference.

Quick aside: Even though it’s glorious that Rails 7 doesn’t ship with Node or Webpack, there’s an unfortunate chance that you might still need that setup. For example, if you need any sort of JavaScript transpiling (i.e., for CoffeeScript, TypeScript, JSX), you will need to default back to a bundler and a package.json file. This tutorial isn’t going to be focusing on setting up Rails 7 with a bundler, so if you’re in that boat, this tutorial isn’t going to be quite as useful for you.

After generating your new Rails app, you’ll need to cd into your new app and create your database.

Next up we run.

rails db:create

And then you can start up your development server.

rails s

Now you can navigate to your browser to localhost:3000, and if everything has gone according to plan, you should see the Rails default index page.