HOWTO: install Ruby on Rails on Debian or Ubuntu Linux easily

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In the early days of this blog I used to run it on Typo, which *was* a great Ruby on Rails blogging platform (at one time). Unfortunately the project stalled (for years) and I ended up jumping ship after a few months of bugs and the ever crashing Rails server, WEBrick. Yes, if you search Netcraft you could see that was my *exposed* server at the time…not good! Now if you look, Typo is still kicking, and it *may* be a solid platform now, I hope it is, as I even contributed a ton of the achieved themes that live on in the ‘Theme Garden’ there. But on I moved into the world of MySQL/PHP front end sites via great apps like Drupal and Wordpress, fast forward, Ruby on Rails is a mature platform now, and I am evaluating webapps at work, so I needed to install Rails on Debian GNU/Linux (but of course these directions would work just as well in Ubuntu Linux. It’s amazing simple, I took some steps from the Ruby on Rails wiki, first install the dependencies for good measure:

apt-get -y install ruby irb ri rdoc ruby1.8-dev build-essential

Then install rubygems and rails:

apt-get -y install rubygems rails

Yep, that was easy. Now create your first rails app to ensure things are working as they should be:

rails newrailsapp cd newrailsapp script/server

Then hit your server to see it live, hit it in your browser: http://120.0.0.1:3000. Or, if you’re like me, you’re running it on a remote server, have it bind WEBrick to the IP that you use to access it, so in my case I quit out of WEBrick, and restarted it with:

script/server --binding=192.168.1.8

And then hit it via http://192.168.1.8:3000 Nice, so much easier than I remember it being. While I’m posting here, I’ll drop a few more links I want to follow, as if I use RoR on upcoming projects I’ll need to investigate as we scale to the clouds!

CouchDB with Rails

REST on Rails

someone
no you shouldn't install rails using apt-get, you should install it using the gem utility. Otherwise it may not be visible to other gems (like mongrel, HELLO who uses webrick anymore??) which are needed for your rails application. So fail fail fail for your "easy" tutorial which leads you to a lot of configuration problems later on.

fak3r
I'll take the criticism over running Webrick, but remember, I'm just doing this for development work, in a production case I'd be all about a bunch of mongrels fronted by nginx.

As for using gem instead of apt-get for install - as a longtime Debian admin, i swear by apt-get and it's ability to keep a system up to date and secure. What does gem provide me in those terms? Does it keep things up to date as apt-get does? Again, I don't use ROR for anything production currently, but I don't know about best practices in that regard, so I appreciate the feedback.