Core Concepts

Core Concepts explains how Wheels thinks, so the how-to pages elsewhere make sense instead of feeling like incantations. Nothing here requires any particular tooling — it's the framework itself: what happens to a request, why files live where they live, and which pieces you can swap or extend.

If you're new, read the first three in order — they're the mental model everything else builds on. The rest stand alone; pull them up when the corresponding feature enters your app.

You'll find:

• What happens between the web server handing Wheels a request and the response going out
• How models, views, and controllers divide the work — and what the conventions buy you
• The ORM's philosophy, the DI container, and the middleware pipeline
• How routes are matched, and how configuration changes per environment

Reading order

The Request Lifecycle Start here. The pipeline every request travels: rewrite, route match, middleware, controller, view, response.

MVC in Wheels How models, views, and controllers divide the work, and what Wheels wires up for you.

Conventions over Configuration The naming rules that make the wiring automatic — and the one-line overrides for when reality disagrees.

ORM Philosophy Why Wheels reads your schema instead of asking you to declare it, and where the boundaries of the ActiveRecord pattern sit.

The Dependency Injection Container Registering services, resolution scopes (transient, singleton, request), and auto-wiring.

Middleware Pipeline Cross-cutting request handling that runs after route match and before the controller — global or route-scoped.

How Routing Works Pattern matching, precedence, the exact-path fast lane, and how params get built.

Environments and Configuration The five environments, where settings live, and how per-environment overrides layer.