Time to actually put something on your screen. In this lesson we clone the Build New template from GitHub, run one setup command, and open the running app in your browser. By the end you’ll have a full Rails + Inertia + React app with working auth, dashboard, and app shell — all running on your machine.
This is the first hands-on lesson of the course. Most of it is a screen recording of the real workflow, including the exact commands and the common failure mode to watch for.
Once we have the template is running, it’s time to open it up and see what’s actually in there. This lesson is a screen tour of the codebase, walking through the Rails side, the React side, and the styling layer, so you’ll know where to find things when you start building.
We’ll also take a close look at the CLAUDE.md file at the root of the project — one of the most important files in the template, even though it’s just plain markdown. It’s what tells AI coding tools how your project is organized and what patterns to follow.
- Checking that you have the prerequisites installed (Ruby, Node, Postgres)
- Cloning the starter template from GitHub
- Running
bin/setupand what it’s actually doing under the hood - Opening the running app in your browser and clicking through the built-in features
- Why the
CLAUDE.mdfile is one of the most valuable files in your project