Ruby on Rails Development Setup

This post documents my development setup for Ruby on Rails on Linux, MacOS X, and Windows. The Linux-specific instructions are geared towards Ubuntu, but should be easy to translate to other distributions.

Platform-Dependent Steps
The first part of the setup is installing the Ruby programming language, the Rubygems package management library, and the MySQL and SQLite database software. Due to the binary nature of the packages, the instructions are different for each OS.

Keep in mind that Windows and MacOS X differ in various ways from Linux, which will likely be your production environment. For best results, I strongly recommend installing Ubuntu as a dual-boot, or using Virtual Box to get an Ubuntu VM.

Ubuntu Linux
The steps below have been tested on a fresh installation of Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop.

1. Update your package repository: sudo apt-get update
2. Install Ruby: sudo apt-get install build-essential ruby irb rubygems libopenssl-ruby
3. Install MySQL: sudo apt-get install mysql-client mysql-server libmysqlclient-dev
4. When prompted, leave the MySQL root password blank. This will make it easy to share a database.yml file with the rest of your team.
5. Install SQLite:  sudo apt-get install sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev
6. Find out the system-wide RubyGems binary path (pick the one that is not in your home directory): gem env gempath
7. Add the path to the system-wide binary path: sudo echo "PATH=/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin:$PATH" > /etc/profile.d/rubygems1.8.sh
8. Reboot the system so the path change goes into effect.

MacOS X
The steps below have been tested on a fresh installation of MacOS X 10.6: Snow Leopard.

1. Install Xcode from Apple's Developer site, or from the MacOS installation DVD.
2. Go to the MySQL download site, and download the Mac OS X (package format) for your OS (Leopard: 10.5 x86, Snow Leopard: 10.5 x86_64). 
1. You don't have to register, there is a No thanks, just take me to the downloads! link on the mirror page.
2. Install the mysql- pkg file.
3. Install MySQLStartupItem.pkg.
   
4. Install (by double-clicking) MySQL.prefPane, and choose to Install for all users. Start the MySQL server, and check the Automatically Start MySQL Server on Startup box.
   
3. In the Platform-Independent Steps, substitute gem install mysql with the following command, taken from the Riding Rails blog: sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

Windows
The steps below have been tested on a fresh Windows XP SP3 32-bit installation.

1. Install Firefox: www.getfirefox.com
2. Install the latest stable release of 7-Zip: http://www.7-zip.org/
3. Launch the 7-Zip File Manager (in Start > All Programs > 7-Zip). From the menu, select Tools > Options, and check .7z under Associate 7-Zip with. Click Ok to dismiss the dialog, and exit the file manager.
   
4. Go to the OneClick Ruby download site.
1. From the latest RubyInstaller, download the rubyinstaller-1.8.6 executable. Install in the default path c:\Ruby and "add Ruby executable to your path".
2. From the latest Development Kit, download the devkit- archive. Extract its contents in c:\Ruby
   
5. Go to the MySQL download site, and download the Windows MSI Installer (x86). 
1. You don't have to register, there is a No thanks, just take me to the downloads! link on the mirror page.
2. After downloading, do a Complete Install.
3. At the end of installation, check Configure the MySQL server now, and uncheck Register the MySQL server now.
4. When configuring the server, select Detailed Configuration, then Developer Machine, then Multifunctional Database. Accept the defaults, until the Install as Windows Service option shows up, then select both Install as Windows Service and Include Bin Directory in Windows PATH. For ease of development, don't change the root password (so it stays blank).
   
6. Go to the SQLite download site, under the Precompiled Binaries For Windows section. Download the sqlite- and the sqlitedll- zip files, and extract them into c:\windows\system32.
7. Restart your computer so the PATH changes go into effect.
   
8. You can go into a Ruby-enabled command prompt via Start > All Programs > Ruby 1.8.6 > Start Command Prompt with Ruby.
9. In the Platform-Independent Steps section, substitute gem install mysql with the following command. gem install mysql --source http://gems.rubyinstaller.org
   

Platform-Independent Steps
The second part of the development environment setup is identical in all OSes, with one small exception. The gem command should be executed with superuser privileges on Unix systems (Linux, MacOS X). To achieve that, all gem commands should be prefixed by sudo. For example, gem update would become sudo gem update.

Issue the following commands, and you're done setting up!

gem update --system

gem update

gem install rdoc 

gem install rails

gem install mysql

gem install sqlite3-ruby

gem install json mongrel ruby-debug-ide

Motivation
My post is intended to help the students in MIT's Web Programming Competition (6.470) who choose Rails as their back-end platform.

I hope you have found this post to be useful. Please leave a comment if you have trouble using the instructions above, or if you have a suggestion for improving these steps.