--- title: Sinatra + ActiveRecord slug: sinatra-activerecord published_at: 2022-06-03 12:00:10 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:13:31 +0000 summary: description: Quick run through of wiring up Sinatra with ActiveRecord. Code: https://github.com/cjavdev/sinatra-active-record tags: [cjav_dev, web development tutorials, web development for beginners, vim, ruby, sinatra] views: 3038 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/sinatra-activerecord youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgEgTu6NnWg youtube_id: MgEgTu6NnWg embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/MgEgTu6NnWg thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MgEgTu6NnWg/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Sinatra + ActiveRecord *Published: June 03, 2022* *Views: 3038* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgEgTu6NnWg) [![Sinatra + ActiveRecord](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MgEgTu6NnWg/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgEgTu6NnWg) ## Description Quick run through of wiring up Sinatra with ActiveRecord. Code: https://github.com/cjavdev/sinatra-active-record ## Transcript hey what's up welcome back it's been a little while in this episode we're going to jump into sinatra we're going to set up a little sinatra app but uh the goal today is to combine sinatra which is a tiny little micro framework in the ruby ecosystem with active record which is the common orm that we're going to see in rails so in this episode we're just going to start from scratch here and create a little let's actually bundle init so we get a gem file and in my gem file i'm going to start with just adding uh gem sinatra and the sinatra gem is super cool it is very lightweight it has like a little dsl that we can use so we're just going to create like a server.rb notice i'm not like creating a whole bunch of file structure or anything crazy like that so i'm just going to say require sinatra and now i can say i can use the get word for the root and that creates a route for us and we pass in this block that's going to be executed and whatever's returned at the end of the block um is what we're going to see on the page that's like the response whatever we're rendering back so hello world here and now all we have to do is say ruby server and that should fire up our server and now we have a web server listening on port 4567 so we come over here and go to localhost 4567 and go to the root route now we see hello world so that is the basics for getting a sinatra app up and running now there is this gem called active or sinatra dash active record now uh at stripe what we try to do is build a bunch of these things called stripe samples you can check them out over here github.com stripe samples and these are sort of like end to end integrations where we show you how to integrate different things so we have like different integration flows here so this one has a custom payment flow you can use the payment element or pre-built checkout a few different options with this sample but if you drill into each of these we have server implementations in like seven maybe eight different languages and so if you look at ruby we always use sinatra and the reason we do that is because it makes it really easy for you to say like okay here's the route it's a post route i know exactly where what's happening where the stuff is coming in i know exactly what ruby is running when this when this one route executes and i know what's being returned as the response it turns out that like we do this in all of the other server languages too so for node we're using express again it's just like these very simple routes right where we have a get route that goes to slash config and we're going to render back some json same thing if we were to look over at another language maybe even like net recently with the release of the dotnet minimal api you can even do this with c sharps and now they have like you can do map a post to this slash create payment intent thing um and then you can write some c sharp in line very minimal um and so that is one of the benefits of sinatra but the reason that i'm looking for active record is that i at this point we don't actually like do any database layer manipulation we don't ever store anything in the database and the reason is that it's kind of tricky across all these different languages to have a common orm interface to have a common database to have um this common structure where we technically assume that you're going to be using whatever database you already have whether that's mongodb or some postgres database or some other you know like wild back-end that you might already have up and running um we don't necessarily have opinions about that but um the demo that i want to work on is going to show how to do some billing stuff so this will be out soon um in order to show that billing i do want to have some database layer and so i'm looking around for orms that might work with these micro frameworks and so what i want to do is take a look at this sinatra active record extension and so the way this works is we have to install a bunch of different gems here so i'm going to say bundle add sinatra active record we're going to add sqlite 3 and we're going to add rake so sinatra active record this is going to have our orm stuff this is like where all of the meta programming and sql and all of that is sort of built in sql light 3 is the database like the the database plugin that we're going to use so sqlite 3 is going to be the the type of database management system that we're gonna use it's a very lightweight system all right not sure who uh who was actually talking about this recently but there's something like you can do uh like sqlite three sort of at the edge and you can federate the right ahead logs to other edge s3 or sqlite 3 things i don't know it's like becoming a really popular way for um building these like really distributed systems um okay so now after we have those gems installed we're gonna go open up our server.rb and add this one require for activerecord and then we we're gonna use set database to this adapter now sinatra uses this set thing all the time for example we might say like set port to i don't know 4200 that will make it so that okay now when the app starts up it starts listening on 4200 it's kind of how we configure the server is by calling set this is another part of the um the domain specific language or the dsl for sinatra so let's fire the server back up and we'll notice that it still runs and that's all cool but if we ran like bundle let's see bundle actually no the next thing we need to do is we need to create a rake file so we need to say um we're creating this rake file rake is similar to make so make and make files are the thing that you use in like c and c plus plus to combine a bunch of different loaders and build build things basically to like make things so rake is the ruby implementation of that so we're going to add a rake file i don't think we've talked about rake too much i might have an old episode for setting up rake tasks and passing arguments to them but all this is gonna do is create a new namespace db and this is gonna look very similar to when you are running rails commands and you say like rails db create rails db migrate it actually before it was railsdb something it was rake db something and so this is like we're gonna we're gonna harken back a little bit here bundle exec rake dash t is gonna give us the list of rake tasks that are available and so here we can just say like bundle exec rake db i don't think i can run yeah so i need to run it from bundle exec so bundle exec rake db create will create a new database that is the name of the database is going to be food.sqlite3 i don't know we can name this whatever we want like myapp.sqlite3 or just like app.sqli3 so if we say bundle exec rake db create this is going to create that database and we see created database apps equal i3 we can use the sqlite3 cli or command line tool to open up this app.sqlite3 file and now we're inside of like a repl or like you know whatever the the prompt is for sqlite so we can actually say like select star from users or whatever there's no there's no table user so it tells us there's no such table users there's a bunch of like meta commands in here that start with dots we can say dot tables that'll show us all the tables there are none so we'll use dot exit for now the next thing we might want to do is create a migration so that we can create a table so we'll say bundle exec uh rake db create migration oh and then we need a name for it so let's say create users i found that like if you just pass this as another argument that will work as the name you don't actually need to use this like name equals thing that created a migration for us so let's go take a look when we're using rails we can say like rails g model and that will generate the whole model class for us and tests and migrations and all of that but when we're working with sinatra there are no model files necessarily so we're dropping down a layer lower here we have to actually like write our own create table statements here so we're going to say create table users do t now this t that's yielded is going to have a bunch of special methods on it so we can say like t.string is the email address of the user we still have like tdot time stamps and whatever other basic stuff you might expect from an active record migration so that's pretty cool so now we can say bundle exec rake db migrate and that will run the migration this actually changes the underlying database so now if we were to say something like sqlite3 app.sqli3 now we can do dot tables and we see the users table there we also see a couple other metadata tables for us so if we said like i don't know dot schema of users that'll show us like the actual schema command or like the schema that was used to generate the users table we can select star from users now and there's nothing in there one helpful thing that you might want to do is say dot headers on so that way when you select it'll actually have the headers otherwise there is no header column um so that sort of gets us started and now we have a database and we have our server so let's sort of like figure out what we want want to do here with the server so i think inside of here we actually want to create a class called user and that's going to inherit from active record base and i think we want to say that we want to set the table equal to users i believe so um no okay let's see so is this actually just going to work like this so when we say get slash let's say um um user dot find or create by [Music] email is wave c drive.dev dot to json uh ruby server i don't know this is i don't know if this is gonna work let's see uh refresh boom look at that okay so this is the json for the user we just created we have this id has the email that we gave it if we refresh the page we're not creating a new one because it's finding or creating so it's sort of upsetting if we were to change the email address that would change that but i think this might actually work so let's let's get a little fancier with this let's open up our server.rb and let's add a new route that's actually let's actually make this get route return like a template so so we can say erb and then some template name and if we i believe if we have a directory called views maybe uh then we can have like index.html.erb and this can have like some html uh and maybe it has like i don't know um time.now.2i i think this might work i don't know let's see oh also you know what while we're here let's uh so inside of our gem file we just have sinatra but i'm going to add sinatra dash contrib and that's like the i don't know why they keep it separate but um i think it's to keep the pure library like the core library smaller or something but um if we say sinatra reloader i believe that is like the gem that will automatically reload for us so there's a lot of like really basic things that don't come out of the box there are a lot of stuff that do come out of the box okay so no file template.rb so this is another thing sinatra erb templates okay so the the template name needs to actually not be html erb it just should be just erb so now what we can do is we can create a form here and again this is like another good reason not to use form four is so you can just write forms wherever you want so we'll say the form action is going to be like users and the method is going to be post um and then we will say that we're going to accept in the email the email of the user okay so now we have this input box where we can type in an email address so if we put in an email address and hit enter sinatra says that oh we don't have a post route for users so i'm just going to copy that and jump over to the server and add a post route for users and what i want to do here is we'll do like that upsert thing again so we'll say user.find or create by email is i don't know params email and then we'll say this is like at user is equal to this thing and then we can render um let's see let's redirect oh yeah no let's uh run our erb users and we'll add like a new template here and in the user's erb template we'll just put out at users.json 2.json let's see what we get okay we got null and we got null because oh this should just be at user there we go okay so now there is user number two in the database so that's pretty cool now if we wanted to we can also use sessions um so that's like another sinatra thing but i think like what i basically what i wanted to do was kind of like get to a place where i could see um if i can do like crud actions for users so let's just like keep going down this path so we're gonna make a get route for users and erb users let's make this one be like erb user for like show user or something like that and then for users we'll say at users is user.all and then we'll copy this and say user.erb and then we'll go into users and say users.2json and that is a get request now and now we see the array of users we have the one that has wave at c jeff dev and we have the email for jenny rosen so this is this is pretty cool we're we're getting like that now we have create we have read we have like um yeah list now uh i don't know like update and delete shouldn't be too tricky i think that i'm at least at a point where i'm like happy with the fact that we can use active record directly just by creating a class setting this up uh installing the gem and then adding a rake file with those different commands that are documented directly in the github repo so this is kind of how you set up and run with activerecord and sinatra hopefully this was useful if it was throw that thumbs up on there i uh yeah i'm happy to be back and looking forward to hanging out with you all more thanks so much for watching and we'll see in the next one --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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