2008/11/01

Setting up Ubuntu 8.10 for Ruby on Rails development

Here's how I've set up my laptop, running Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) for Ruby on Rails development. You'll need to run the following commands from the command-line as root. These commands worked for me, but I take no responsibility if you trash your box by doing this ;)

There is some duplication here, because I sometimes setup servers with different sub-sets of the software I use on my development laptop. Don't worry about this. It does no harm if you tell apt-get or aptitude to install the same package twice - it will just ignore you the second time.

Not all of the gems here are required for RoR development, but I use cucumber for integration testing, and it has some pre-requisites.



# General/Pre-requisite packages
aptitude install \
build-essential \
screen \
subversion \
mysql-client \
telnet \
meld \
vim \
vim-gnome \
exuberant-ctags \
tk8.5 \
apache2-prefork-dev \
rcov

# mysql server
# use apt-get to avoid installing exim4
DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install --assume-yes \
mysql-server mysql-client \
libmysqlclient15-dev libmysql-ruby1.8


# git
mkdir gitcore
cd gitcore
wget http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.6.0.3.tar.gz
apt-get build-dep git-core --assume-yes
tar xzvf git-1.6.0.3.tar.gz
cd git-1.6.0.3/
./configure
make
make install
cd

# Ruby
aptitude --assume-yes install ruby1.8-dev ruby1.8 ri1.8 rdoc1.8 \
irb1.8 libreadline-ruby1.8 libruby1.8 libopenssl-ruby
ln -s /usr/bin/ruby1.8 /usr/local/bin/ruby;
ln -s /usr/bin/ri1.8 /usr/local/bin/ri;
ln -s /usr/bin/rdoc1.8 /usr/local/bin/rdoc;
ln -s /usr/bin/irb1.8 /usr/local/bin/irb;
ln -s /usr/local/bin/ruby /usr/bin/ruby

# Rubygems. You REALLY don't want to let aptitude install rubygems.
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/45905/rubygems-1.3.1.tgz
tar xzf rubygems-1.3.1.tgz
cd rubygems-1.3.1
ruby setup.rb
ln -s /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/bin/gem
for g in rails rake capistrano capistrano-ext hpricot treetop ruby-debug term-ansicolor mongrel cheat passenger annotate-models rak; do gem install $g; done



Have fun.

David