What if I want to Chirp images?

We are going to need some outside help for this one! In order to Chirp our lovely pictures of cats, we'll need to use a new gem.

gems are packages of code that are ready for anyone working on a Rails project to use. Ask your coach what gems they use day-to-day.

Adding Paperclip

Let's add the gem Paperclip to our project. First, we need to open our Gemfile and add to the bottom:

gem "paperclip", "~> 4.2"

Save the Gemfile. The Gemfile tells Rails what gems we need, but we still need to tell Rails to install them.

The Rails server needs to be restarted to install gems. So we can go to the commandline tab where the server is running, and do the following:

  1. Press Ctrl + c to stop the server.
  2. Run bundle install. Bundler is now installing Paperclip into our project.

    While Paperclip is installing, let's talk with our coach about the Gemfile, and bundler.

  3. Start the server again with rails server.