Learning Rails

Getting Started at the Command Line

Instant Rails and Heroku may offer relatively easy ways to create and manage a Rails application, but they’re definitely not necessary. Installing Rails by hand requires installing Ruby, installing Gems, and then installing Rails. You will eventually also need to install SQLite, MySQL, or another relational database, though SQLite is already present on the Mac and in many Linux distributions.

Note

If you’re wondering how to find this “command line,” you need to find a terminal application. On the Mac, it’s called Terminal, and it’s in the Utilities folder of Applications. Linux terminals vary, but it’s probably gnome-terminal or kterm. On Windows, it’s the Command Prompt, cmd.exe. If you’ve never used a command line, you may want to get a quick reference guide for your operating system that covers it.

Ruby comes standard on a number of Linux and Macintosh platforms. To see whether it’s there, and what version it has, enter ruby -v at the command prompt. You’ll want Ruby 1.8.6 or later, so you may need to update it to a more recent version:

• On Mac OS X, Leopard (10.5) includes Ruby 1.8.6, but the previous version of OS X included Ruby 1.8.2. If you’re on Tiger (10.4) or an earlier version of OS X, you’ll need to update Ruby itself, a challenge that’s beyond the scope of this book. You may want to investigate MacPorts, and the directions at http://nowiknow.wordpress.com/2007/10/07/install-ruby-on-rails-for-mac/. For a more comprehensive installation, ...