Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu (Shallow Thoughts)

Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu

Back when I laboriously installed Ruby and Rails on Ubuntu "Hoary Hedgehog" (which involved basically ignoring all the Ubuntu packages and building everything, including Ruby itself, from source), I was cheered by the notes in Ubuntu's forums and bugzilla indicating that as of the next release ("Breezy Badger") all the right versions would be there, and all this source compilation would no longer be necessary.

I didn't get around to trying it until today. Breezy and its successor "Dapper Drake" do indeed have a rails package as well as a Ruby package, and I happily installed them. All looked great -- until I actually tried to use them on a real-world application. It turns out that the Ruby and Rails packages don't include gems, Ruby's package manager (similar to the CPAN system familiar to Perl programmers). And gems is required for doing anything useful in Rails.

Drat! After several false starts, I eventually found the instructions on this page. Except that installs way more than seems necessary for what I need to do, and if you copy/paste lines from that page you may end up with a bunch of packages you don't want, like an out of date version of mysql.

So here are simplified instructions for using Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu Breezy or Dapper.

As yourself:

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/5207/rubygems-0.8.11.tgz
tar zxvf rubygems-0.8.11.tgz

As root:

cd rubygems-0.8.11
ruby setup.rb
gem install rubygems-update
gem install rails

Say yes to all dependency questions during the gem install of rails. Add your web server and database of choice (you probably already have them installed, anyway) and you should be good to go.

You may note that the page I referenced tells you to install two versions of rails: the Ubuntu package plus the one from gems. At least on Dapper, you don't need both. Installing rails pulls in the packages:
irb irb1.8 libpgsql-ruby1.8 libreadline-ruby1.8 libredcloth-ruby1.8 libruby1.8 rake rdoc rdoc1.8 ruby ruby1.8
I haven't experimented with which of these packages are and are not needed. If you run into problems, some set of packages from this list may solve them.

Update: it seems that none of these are required. Many of them are dummy packages anyway, which contain no files related to the actual package name. For instance, the rake package contains, not rake, but a single bash completion file related to rake. So you should be fine ignoring all of them, installing just Ruby and nothing else.

(I filed bug 34840 requesting that Ubuntu ship a usable version of Rails, since it didn't seem to be filed already.)

Tags: programming
[ 22:56 Mar 13, 2006    More programming | permalink to this entry | ]