SysAdmins' Chronicles

Introduction

Ruby on Rails is a agile web development framework written in Ruby. Ruby is a very easy to use and easy to learn language. The syntax is quite enjoyable to work with and it "just makes sense." I like to consider Ruby a no-intimidation programming language.

In this post I will go into the installation of the Ruby on Rails web application framework. Talk about best practices and creating your first rails application.

The Installation

I would recommend when setting up a Ruby on Rails server that you compile the packages from source. You are guaranteed to have a solid installation which in turn provides a solid foundation for your rails web applications.

Create Necessary Directories

mkdir -p /opt/local/src
cd /opt/local/src

Download Necessary Files

wget ftp://ftp.cwru.edu/pub/bash/readline-5.2.tar.gz
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/20989/rubygems-0.9.4.tgz
wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz

Extract Downloaded Packages

tar xzf ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz
tar xzf readline-5.2.tar.gz
tar xzf rubygems-0.9.4.tgz

Setting Your Environment

echo 'PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH' >> ~/.bash_profile

The command above will automatically setup your PATH environment variable when you login. At this point run the following command to skip logging out and back in again.

. ~/.bash_profile

Installing Readline

cd readline-5.2
./configure
make
sudo make install

Installing Ruby

cd ../ruby-1.8.6
./configure --prefix=/opt/local --enable-pthread --with-readline-dir=/opt/local
make
sudo make install

Check Ruby Installation

bash $ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.6 (2006-08-25)

If it does not look like this then the ruby installation either failed or your path is not correct

Installing RubyGems

cd ../rubygems-0.9.4
ruby setup.rb

Installing Ruby on Rails

sudo gem install rails -- --include dependencies

If this step above fails just press the up arrow and run it again. It will work, there is some sort of bug in rubygems that causes this to fail on the first run.

Creating Your First Application

mkdir -p /var/www
cd /var/www
rails firstapp
cd firstapp
./script/generate controller hello index
echo "Hello World" > app/views/hello/index.rhtml
./script/server

Now open a web browser and navigate to the server's IP address, if it is on the local machine use 127.0.0.1:3000. This will display the web application that you just created. Now type the following into the URL.

http://127.0.0.1:3000/hello/

Now the Hello World web application should appear in your web browser.

Where To Go From Here

Now that you have a fully working development environment setup on any operating system you are all set to either start developing in Rails or upgrading this machines purpose to be a production Ruby on Rails server.