From my experience, there are really two good ways to get Rails setup on OS X. Locomotive or following Dan Benjamin’s tutorial over at Hive Logic. Each has there benefits and drawbacks for people who are just getting involved with Rails or for those who bought Agile web Development with Rails and are itching to learn a bit more. It’s a frustrating thing that web developers face—How much setup work do I have to do to before I can just start working?
This is why I thought Locomotive would be my savior. And for the most part it is. It’s simple to use, straight forward enough to get rolling with Rails quickly, and easy to delete if you decided becoming a Rails guru isn’t for you. You just download the package, launch the application and you can get a test rails app going. It even has a nice option to setup Rails if you have an existing application or have downloaded one off the web and want to test it out.
Then there’s Dan Benjamin’s tutorials. I’ve used them but to be honest I’m putting all my faith in his expertise and basically just copying and pasting his stuff right into the terminal. Though there’s some distinct advantages to going through a fairly uncomplicated process especially after you follow his subversion setup as well. It just makes following a lot of online tutorials easier because you don’t have to deal with the Locomotive element and when they recommend installing stuff with subversion you can follow their steps exactly. I found installing gems easier after going through this setup method as well. Locomotive has these “bundles” but I haven’t played with them at all.
After trying out both I see it more as a continuum. First you play around using Locomotive, then when you find it restricting, go with the straight forward tutorials from Dan. Regardless of what choice you make it’s about a million times easier to get things setup and running with Rails then it was a few years ago when neither of these resources were available and I was trying to setup everything.
Does anyone else have any tips for working with Rails on OS X?
Wait until Leopoard :)
For those of you who are just beginning. I have one important tip. Hang in there if the installation is somewhat intimidating. I was, but I refused to give up. Once you get the hang of it then working with Rails (and Ruby) truly is very rewarding. And I have just been fiddling with Rails for a few months.
I found it most easy to use DarwinPorts (now MacPorts), installing the following packages: ruby, rb-rubygems, mysql5, and rb-mysql5. Then you put /opt/local/bin at the beginning of your path, and you’re set.
The setup on your local machine is easy compared to setting up a development server or a production machine. Have you come across any good docs on making this happen?
Thanks!
Sam - I’ve just been doing mainly stuff on a the development server but I’ve been trying to deploy a personal project using TextDrive. They’ve got a <a href=”https://help.textdrive.com/index.php?pg=kb.chapter&id=71” rel=”nofollow”>great tutorial</a> on how to set it up on their servers.
Thanks
Thank you for the instructions :)