rails

I've been hearing a lot lately about the power of the Ruby on Rails framework. I decided that I'm going to create a website and learn ruby and rails in the process.

I've decided to host with textdrive because they support rails. I found textdrive by browsing around some tags on de.icio.us and trying to find the most popular links. Not terribly scientific; I'll let you know my experience with textdrive soon.

First off, there are a bunch of good tutorials on how to get started with rails; even some that specifically address setup on a mac.

My main reason for blogging the experience was that I had problems with the setup. So here's some tips:

• After you've installed ruby, it may not be enough to set your path so that your new version (1.8.x) of ruby is found by default. Instead,

  mv /usr/bin/ruby

  out of the way, and

  ln -s /usr/local/bin/ruby /usr/bin/ruby

  
  
• When installing gem,

  sudo ruby setup.rb all

  - make sure you add the all parameter. Some of the docs don't include it and then you get complaints from the setup util.
  

I also couldn't remember how to get apache up and running. O'Reilly has a good series on web serving from a mac.

So far so good. I got through most of the rails tutorial and have a lame site running on my mac. I figured I take a detour though and read up a little bit on ruby.