Adventures in the land of Ruby on Rails, Part 1
patrick — Sat, 2006-10-14 17:29
So I've been hearing alot of good things about Ruby on Rails (RoR) in various places & from several people including sitepoint.com, several developers in eve-online, & several chat rooms I frequent. I even made an attempt at using the Seagull framework as it's supposed to be based on RoR, but written in PHP. I think part of my problem with Seagull is it starts with a CMS ready built & I was trying to jump in & modify it without having a clue as to what was going on.
Googling for Ruby on Rails sends me to their main page. From the main page I ended up at http://www.rubyonrails.org/down where it boldly states "Get Ruby on Rails in no time" (unfortunately if you're hearing the webpage or using a text browser you'll see "Web development that doesn't hurt" instead).
I like being lazy & initially thought that installing the debian package for rails would be enough, but the debian package doesn't include the gem package manager for rails... which means I'm stuck with waiting for debian testing to update & I can't install any of the extra packages very easily. After checking what debian packages where going to be uninstalled along with rails I noted which packages needed to be reinstalled - libapache2-mod-ruby, & ruby, & rdoc. I also added the libmysql-ruby & libdbd-mysql-ruby packages, but I don't know if they were necessarily needed.
After reinstalling these packages I continued on down the list. Downloading gem from http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=126. The file I downloaded was rubygems-0.9.0.tgz (please check & see what the newest version is... things usually work better with the newest version). After running "tar -xvzf rubygems-0.9.0.tgz" I 'cd'ed into the created directory & ran "ruby setup.rb".
Everything seemed to go just fine & so I proceeded with "gem install rails --include-dependencies". This caused some stuff to be output to the screen & the last line was a complaint because rdoc wasn't installed (yes, I inserted it into the list above). I reinstalled rdoc, reran the "gem install rails --include-dependencies", & this time no complaints (I still haven't checked to see if it created the docs or not).
At this point I have Ruby 1.8.2, gem 0.9.0, rails 1.1.6, rake 0.7.1, & RDoc v1.0.1 - 20041108.
