Skip to Main Content
Learning Rails
book

Learning Rails

by Simon St. Laurent, Edd Dumbill
November 2008
Beginner content levelBeginner
448 pages
12h 25m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from 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, ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Learning Rails 5

Learning Rails 5

J. Mark Locklear, Eric J Gruber, Barnabas Bulpett
Mastering Ruby Closures

Mastering Ruby Closures

Benjamin Tan Wei Hao
Ruby on Rails® Bible

Ruby on Rails® Bible

Timothy Fisher

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596154943Supplemental ContentErrata