Ruby & RailsSetup

Alan Hecht

Windows Setup

• Rails Installer - Ruby, Rails, Git, Sqlite, SQL Server support- railsinstaller.org

• Ruby Installer- Just Ruby- rubyinstaller.org

Git on Windows

• Git for Windows- Minimal environment to run Git

• msysGit- Build Git on Windows as well as run it

• GitHub for Windows- GUI front end for msysGit

OS X Setup

• System version of Ruby & Rails is old

• Git included with Lion & Mountain Lion- Version is reasonably up-to-date

• Homebrew for additional packages like ImageMagick or ffmpeg

OSX - GCC Installation

• XCode

• Apple provides command line tools for Lion/Mountain Lion which include GCC

• OS X GCC Installer available for Snow Leopard on GitHub

Linux Setup

• Pre-built Ruby package is usually out of date

• Pre-built Rubygems package is usually out of date- Rubygems has its own means of updating itself

• Need to install prerequisite packages before installing Ruby

Ubuntu - Prerequisites

• The following packages are needed for rvm & ruby on Ubuntu 12.04:

build-essential bison openssl libreadline6 libreadline6-dev zlib1g zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libyaml-dev sqlite3 libsqlite3-0 libxml2-dev libxslt-dev autoconf curl libtool

Ruby Version Management

• Useful for running older or different versions of Ruby

• RVM or rbenv on Linux & OS X, pik on Windows

RVM

• Works by wrapping existing Ruby & shell commands with shell scripts

• Configuration can be either single user or multiple users

• Support for gem sets

rbenv

• Works by adding ~/.rbenv/shims to $PATH

• Configuration is per user

• Optional support for gem sets

RVM or rbenv

• rbenv is lighter weight & simpler

• RVM is easier to use, more suitable for a development environment- Wrapping shell builtins with a script isn’t

evil

• rbenv more suitable for a production server

pik

• Installed as a gem

• Allows you to choose which Ruby executable to use

• Does not manage gem sets