Chapter 3: Installing Rails - Keep it!

In the Note to beta book readers, you mention the possibility of completely removing this chapter, and ask for our feedback. Mine is: update it and keep it! This is valuable info for those of us needing to install or update our Ruby or Rails. Thanks

Yes! Please keep it!

As a total newbie to web development(although not a newbie to desktop development) and ruby and Aptana and Rad Rails (Which is what I am using to get to grips with all this) I have found every single word totally helpful.

(apart from the mistakes that is lol :-))

James West

OK—the next beta will have this note removed and be updated slightly. In subsequent betas, I’ll look at expanding it even more.

I suggest a small but useful addition to the Chapter 3 “Installing Rails”: consider mentioning the Bitnami.org’s RubyStack installer. The reasons are:
(1) its graphical install wizard is very simple for the beginners and convenient for advanced developers;
(2) it is multi-platform (Linux, Mac x86, Mac PPC, Solaris x86, Solaris SPARC, Windows);
(3) the developer installation includes almost all the necessary tools (Apache, ImageMagick, Mongrel, MySQL, Ruby, Rails, Rmagick, RubyGems, OpenSSL, phpMyAdmin (for MySQL), SQLite3, Subversion, zlib, ...);
(4) the production variant of the installation is optimized for speed & productivity;
(5) it’s installed in one directory and doesn’t modify anything else in the system.
I use it under Linux, Mac and Windows and I’m quite satisfied with it, indeed. To my opinion, it’s quite pragmatic and especially useful for developing and testing cross-platform applications as well as for unified training samples.

Hi Sam.

I have a comment and suggestion on section 3.3 Installing on Mac OS X. The directions as written will certainly work, but I’m concerned about directly upgrading the versions that ship with Leopard or 10.4.6. Apple could mess with your installation during a future update or your modifications could affect other applications dependent on Apple’s versions.

I suggest starting with the same section 3.3 from the second edition and updating it to reflect any new information (i.e., Leopard and SQLite3 stuff). The hivelogic.com directions have been updated for Leopard ( http://hivelogic.com/articles/2008/02/ruby-rails-leopard) and for Tiger (http://hivelogic.com/articles/2007/02/ruby-rails-mongrel-mysql-osx).

I’m glad to see this chapter is sticking around.

I’m still new to OS X, and frankly I’m a bit surprised at how hard basic things are as compared to Ubuntu, but in any case I started from the instructions I found on Developing Rails Applications on Mac OS X Leopard that I found on the Apple Developer Connection website.

In a subsequent pass over the book, I’ll look into adding information on compiling the code for yourself and introduce the notion of not overwriting the system installed versions.