Michelle M. CallMeKnits

How to make a contact form in rails 6

This is a quick walk through on how to:

make a contact form in rails 6,
test it locally, and
move it into production using heroku and the MailGun addon

This uses the free heroku and mailgun plans. If you get stuck on any part, check the full code here.

Setup

Create new working folder /tailwind/. Open in terminal
run npm init -y
run npm install tailwindcss @tailwindcss/custom-forms postcss-cli autoprefixer postcss-nested cssnano
run npx tailwind init
Edit tailwind.config.js and replace plugins: [], with:

plugins: [

Hiding your credentials from GitHub

In many cases, we need to use secret information in our Ruby; most commonly, API keys and email account passwords.

You should never paste these strings directly into your Ruby code. There are bots that can and will steal your API keys the instant you push your code to a public GitHub repository. Even if you pay for private repositories, it's a good idea to not store secrets in your repo -- you may not want all of your collaborators (interns?) to know, for example, the API keys to your payment processor.

(If you have already pushed an API key to a public repository, you should sign into your API dashboard now and invalidate that old key, and get a new one. Assume that the old one has already been stolen. Reverting your commit will do no good.)

But if our Ruby needs to use these secrets, but we can't keep them in our code, what's the solution? Environment variables. We're going to use a gem called Figaro to make this easy.

SHORTCUTS

Key/Command	Description
Tab	Auto-complete files and folder names
Ctrl + A	Go to the beginning of the line you are currently typing on
Ctrl + E	Go to the end of the line you are currently typing on
Ctrl + U	Clear the line before the cursor
Ctrl + K	Clear the line after the cursor
Ctrl + W	Delete the word before the cursor
Ctrl + T	Swap the last two characters before the cursor

	## How to hide API keys from github ##

	1. If you have already pushed commits with sensitive data, follow this guide to remove the sensitive info while
	retaining your commits: https://help.github.com/articles/remove-sensitive-data/

	2. In the terminal, create a config.js file and open it up:

	touch config.js
	atom config.js