Installing Instrumental Components

Instrumental Components is a private gem that you can install in your projects, which gives you the ability to install individual components on an as-needed basis. Alternatively, you can use the Starter Kit to get started.

Step 1

First fire up a fresh Rails app using the following command (or use your own preferences on rails new). The only hard requirement here is to use the latest version of Tailwind CSS.

rails new projectname --css=tailwind

Then cd into your new app's directory.

cd projectname

Step 2

You should also make sure you have the following installed in your rails project:

• Rails ActiveStorage
• Rails ActionText

rails active_storage:install

rails action_text:install

rails db:migrate

Step 3

Add the installer gem to your Gemfile.

gem 'instrumental-components'

Then run bundle install.

bundle install

Step 4

Run the following command to install and register the instrumental-components-library gem into your project.

That will add gem 'instrumental-components-library' to your Gemfile, inside of the group :development group.

That's right! You don't actually need to have the instrumental-components-library in your production environment. It's only used to generate and install code into your project while you're actively developing.

Go deeper

To learn more about building with Instrumental Components and how it works, read up on these: