I recently starting trying out ruby on rails and I am not sure what scaffolds are for in rails.
Say I run this command: rails generate scaffold idea name:string description:text picture:string
What exactly is it doing apart from creating new files in your project directory? Is it creating a table for the database?
Thank you very much.
Take a look at the Rails guide on scaffolding.
When you use the generate scaffold command, you're creating a migration (which will create a table when you run rake db:migrate), views, css, script files, initial tests, etc. Think of the literal meaning of the term "scaffold" as "a structure around which something is constructed" and scaffolding starts to make a lot of sense.