that contained the steps and explained how to install ruby via apt-get, then get the latest rubygems, install that manually, ran gem to update itself, then run gem to install rails - as suggested. The steps I took from that page:
On a Debian Lenny system that does not have ruby, rubygems or rails installed on it yet:
apt-get update apt-get upgrade apt-get install ruby-dev ruby ri rdoc irb libreadline-ruby libruby libopenssl-ruby sqlite3 libsqlite3-ruby libsqlite-dev libsqlite3-dev
Once that completes without errors, make sure ruby is installed and ok:
ruby -v
Now download the latest rubygem (1.3.5 as of this post) from RubyForge http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=126:
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/60718/rubygems-1.3.5.tgz
Unpack it, change into the directory, run setup:
tar xzvf rubygems-1.3.5.tgz cd rubygems-1.3.5 ruby setup.rb
After that you’ll see:
RubyGems 1.3.5 installed
Then it’s suggested that you make a symlink to gem1.8 so you can run it as gem:
ln -s /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/bin/gem
Now make sure everything is up to date (even though we just installed the latest):
gem update gem update --system
And finally - install rails:
gem install rails
After this you can check what gem has installed, and their version numbers:
gem list
And there you have it, more steps than I wanted, but now I know how to have a Debian system up to date, with Ruby, and then having rubygems handling all of the other ruby things that are better dealt with as gems. As for systems I already have running in production in mixed enviroments? I’ll look to migrate those to properly configured installs in the future. I guess for extra credit I should contact the maintainer of rubygems, and the associated gems, for Debian to get their side of the story, or maybe a solution they could put in place moving forward.
Original post:
I’ve been using Ruby on Rails on and off for many years now, and friends are always showing me new RoR apps to try out that look fly. I can get things up and running fine, but it’s when the time comes to update an app that I have issues; I seem to come to the fork in the road where apt-get doesn’t have the latest version of Rails or some dendancy, and gem install is the proposed solution. I worry that mixing the two updating procedures will mess things up, since I have seen this before in Debian GNU/Linux, as well as FreeBSD (I suspect it’s me, and there’s a right way to do it). So, for example, today I noticed there was a new version Redmine a few days ago, so I update to the latest via SVN (the suggested way of updating Redmine):
`# cd /opt/redmine-svn
svn up
At revision 3076.`
Now I copy in the email.yml and database.yml from my working instance so this will use the same config:
# cp /opt/redmine/config/database.yml /opt/redmine/config/email.yml config/
So far so good, let’s rake it up:
# RAILS_ENV=production rake db:migrate (in /opt/redmine-svn) Missing the Rails 2.3.4 gem. Please gem install -v=2.3.4 rails, update your RAILS_GEM_VERSION setting in config/environment.rb for the Rails version you do have installed, or comment out RAILS_GEM_VERSION to use the latest version installed.
So here we are, crap, what version of Rails do I have installed via apt-get?
# apt-cache showpkg rails | head -n3 Package: rails Versions: 2.2.3-1 (/var/lib/apt/lists/ftp.debian.org_debian_dists_squeeze_main_binary-i386_Packages) (/var/lib/dpkg/status)
Damn, so what version of Debian am I running?
# cat /etc/issue.net Debian GNU/Linux squeeze/sid
Yep, the latest, testing branch. So here I am, do I leave the apt-get world and start up gem install or what? My hesitation is that this is my ‘production’ version of Redmine, and I don’t really want to build out a sep install just to test my Rails updating, and if I do that, will the gem Rails install hose my current apt-get installed Rails anyway? So this is the problem I’ve had since I started playing with Rails apps, and it’s been about 3 years now (fak3r.com was on Typo for almost a year). I’m open to suggestions as to how others handle this, do you just install Debian and then not even use apt-get for Rails/Ruby stuff? It seems that gem install always have the most up to date stuff, I’m just concerned that updating things that way will interfere with an apt-get update; apt-get upgrade of the main system later, particularly now that I’m already in the apt-get side. Do I reinstall and go all gem install for just Ruby stuff, and apt-get just for the system? How do people segment this? There has to be a proper way that I’m missing.
Comments?