script/rails vs rails

Question

I'm writing a tutorial where I demo some rails commands. On my machine rails and script/rails both work equally well. Is there a "preferred" form? Which of the two works more universally?

Answer 1

When you run the rails executable within a Rails 3 application, it looks for the script/rails file and, if it's present, executes that file with the arguments you passed to rails.

The reason why you'd use rails over script/rails generally falls down to the fact that it's shorter.

One more thing to note, there's also the rails c command which, in a Rails 2 application, will generate an application folder called c inside the current directory. Using script/rails, this wouldn't happen; instead it would complain that the script/rails doesn't exist.

Answer 2

In Rails 3 it should be just rails.

Answer 3

"rails" will show all about the script usage:

Usage: rails COMMAND [ARGS]

The most common rails commands are:
 generate    Generate new code (short-cut alias: "g")
 console     Start the Rails console (short-cut alias: "c")
 server      Start the Rails server (short-cut alias: "s")
 dbconsole   Start a console for the database specified in config/database.yml
             (short-cut alias: "db")
 new         Create a new Rails application. "rails new my_app" creates a
             new application called MyApp in "./my_app"

In addition to those, there are:
 application  Generate the Rails application code
 destroy      Undo code generated with "generate"
 benchmarker  See how fast a piece of code runs
 profiler     Get profile information from a piece of code
 plugin       Install a plugin
 runner       Run a piece of code in the application environment

All commands can be run with -h for more information.