This is part of an on-going series of posts on learning Ruby on Rails. It’s a bit technical but not too much so. If you’re interested in startups and are a “business guy” it definitely wouldn’t hurt to understand everything I write here, as I’m pretty much a total noob, but was willing to learn. Enjoy!
While Ruby on Rails prides itself on requiring few dependencies, there are still a couple of things you need to install/setup in order to actually start doing anything in Rails.
- Xcode Tools (the Apple developer toolkit)
- Ruby (the most up-to-date version)
- Ruby Gems (the package manager)
- Rails (the framework itself)
- Sqlite (one of the preferred database engines)
While there are apparently some auto-installers out there, I chose to use Hivelogic’s guide to installing Ruby – which is also referenced as a guide from the official Ruby on Rails site. I figured I’d do things manually so I could better understand what was going on – also none of three I looked at (Locomotive, MacPorts, Finks) seemed that very user-friendly, so might as well go with the pure install.
Note: In hindsight, I probably would have used the setup recommended by the Ruby section on About.com – it makes you install RVM (Ruby Version Manager) and Git but still it looks pretty easy.
What ended up happening was that things were a little bit trickier than I anticipated, and also because it is still so new, some stuff in Rails 3 wasn’t working exactly right, so it took roughly 4 hours for me and I’m still not 100% convinced I did it right. But anyway, here’s how it went:
Jason Shen is the co-founder of 