Every Flavour Beans

This is an adaptation to Ubuntu GNU/Linux platform of my previous post which was meant for the Windows platform: Setting Up Rails Development Environment on Windows Vista/XP

I can think of two different ways in which you might want to set up a development environment for Ruby on Rails on a GNU/Linux machine. One is to download everything outside of the package manager of your distribution i.e. build everything from the source. I am going to cover the second, easier way: how to setup Rails on a Debian/Ubuntu machine using its package manager for the most part. I show below how to setup Ruby, RubyGems, Rails, Mongrel, MySQL, and Subversion as part of the development stack.

1. Installing Ruby:

   If not already installed, install the build-essential package first:

   # sudo aptitude install build-essential

   Then install the Ruby and related packages:

   # sudo aptitude install ruby irb ri rdoc rake libopenssl-ruby libsqlite3-ruby ruby1.8-dev

2. Installing Rubygems

   Though it is possible to install Rubygems using the Ubuntu package manager, not only will you get an old version of rubygems if you do so, it also may not be compatible with the latest version of rails. I strongly recommend you download the source code package of the latest version of rubygems and install it using its setup script:

   # cd $HOME
   # wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/38646/rubygems-1.2.0.tgz
   # tar xvzf rubygems-1.2.0.tgz && cd rubygems-1.2.0
   # sudo ruby setup.rb

   Debian purists may frown at installing packages all over the system directories outside of control of the package manager. See Debian’s position on Rubygems. [via - RailsOnUbuntu]
   Remember to download the latest version of rubygems available(currently 1.2.0). You can remove the downloaded tgz archive and the extracted directory after the installation is finished.

   #cd $HOME
   # rm -r rubygems-1.2.0.tgz rubygems-1.2.0

   If Ubuntu complains that the ‘gem’ command is not found, you may have to create a symbolic link like this:

   # sudo ln /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/bin/gem

   You can update the rubygems package by running the following command:

   # sudo gem update ––system

3. Installing Rails

   The final step is to install the Rails gem package itself.

   # sudo gem install rails

   This will install the latest Rails version on your Ubuntu GNU/Linux. If you ever want to update Rails in the future, just run the following command:

   # sudo gem update rails

   You can update the other packages using Ubuntu’s package management tools(aptitude) since that is how you installed those packages in the first place.

The basic Rails development environment is now installed on your system and you can skip the rest of the post if you are happy with WEBrick as the web server, SQLite as the database server and your favourite text editor/IDE that may be already installed on your system. The following instructions cover installing an alternate web server called Mongrel; MySQL database server and its GUI tools; and Subversion.

4. Installing Mongrel

   Installing the Rails gem also installs the WEBrick web server which is ideally suited for development purposes. Another much recommended web server for Rails development as well as production environment is the Mongrel web server. To install the Mongrel web server, run the following gem command:

   # sudo aptitude install mongrel

   After installing Mongrel, Rails automatically starts the Mongrel instead of WEBrick web server when you run the Rails applications in development mode. (Refer to Mongrel documentation to know more about runing Rails applications under Mongrel in production mode.)

5. Installing MySQL

   This step covers the installation of MySQL database server and its GUI tools. Skip this step if you want to use some other database server. Run the following command to install the required mysql packages:

   # sudo aptitude install mysql-server mysql-admin mysql-query-browser

   One important step during the configuration process is to select a root password(you will need to enter it in the database.yml configuration file of your Rails application).

6. Installing Subversion

   Finally, install your favourite revision control software - CVS, Subversion, git etc. You can install subversion in this way:

   # sudo aptitude install subversion

Now you can create/checkout Rails applications, edit the files using your favourite text editor/IDE and run it under Mongrel. In future, I will try to write about developing Rails applications using integrated development environments like Eclipse and NetBeans.