Rails error message on views folder - ruby-on-rails

Question

Ive been going through this for hours and i cant seem to find the problem. Im doing a simple contacts form in rails , this is a tutorial im following so bear with me. I get the following error message :
undefined method `name' for #
I have this in my DB/migrate file:
class CreateContacts < ActiveRecord::Migration
def change
create_table :contacts do |t|
t.string :name
t.string :email
t.text :comments
t.timestamps
end
end
end
this on my contacts_controller.rb file:
class ContactsController < ApplicationController
def new
#contact = Contact.new
end
def create
end
end
and this is on my pages_controller.rb:
class PagesController < ApplicationController
def homepage
end
def about
end
end
This is my html :
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-4 col-md-offset-4">
<div class="well">
<%= form_for #contact do |f| %>
<div class="form-group">
<%= f.label :name %>
<%= f.text_field :name, class: 'form-control' %>
</div>
<div class="form-group">
<%= f.label :email %>
<%= f.email_field :email, class: 'form-control' %>
</div>
<div class="form-group">
<%= f.label :comments %>
<%= f.text_area :comments, class: 'form-control' %>
</div>
<%= f.submit 'Submit', class: 'btn btn-default' %>
<% end %>
</div>
</div>
</div>

Answer 1

Did you run your migration?
If not, do so:
bundle exec rake db:migrate
This will create the contacts table in your database (which has the name column along with other columns email and comments that you're using while building your form). Also, re-start your rails server and then you should be able to use your form code without any problem.

Answer 2

You have probably not migrated your table.
In your console run:
rake db:migrate
Then restart your server and try again.

Answer 3

The other answers summed it up well - you need to migrate your contacts table:
$ rake db:migrate
You'll want to read up on Rails migrations here.
As an aside,
Pages
I don't know which tutorial everyone seems to be following, it's telling you to use specific actions for static pages, which IMO is pretty bad practice (especially in the long run).
A much more versatile (and "Railsy*) solution is to put the content for the data in the database, which you can then call with a model - allowing you to have a single show view for all your pages:
#config/routes.rb
resources :pages, only: [:show]
#app/controllers/pages_controller.rb
class PagesController < ApplicationController
def show
#page = Page.find params[:id]
end
end
#app/views/pages/show.html.erb
<%= #page.title %>
<%= #page.body %>
You'd have to create another migration for the pages datatable, as follows:
$ rails g migration CreatePages
class CreatePages < ActiveRecord::Migration
def change
create_table :pages do |t|
t.string :title
t.text :body
t.timestamps
end
end
end
$ rake db:migrate
HTML
Your current HTML can be a lot more efficient:
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-4 col-md-offset-4">
<div class="well">
<%= form_for #contact do |f| %>
<% attributes = {name: "text_field", email: "email_field", comments: "text_area"} %>
<% attributes.each do |attr,val| %>
<div class="form-group">
<%= f.label attr.to_sym %>
<%= f.send(val, attr.to_sym, class: 'form-control') %>
</div>
<% end %>
<%= f.submit 'Submit', class: 'btn btn-default' %>
<% end %>
</div>
</div>
</div>