Rails Development On Ubuntu

There's no shortage of posts on the web describing how to setup Ubuntu for Rails development but I'm going to add one more anyway. I choose to write this because none of the posts I ran across were geared towards a current Rails, RSpec, Cucumber, Git setup.

I'm using Ubuntu 9.04 (JauntyJackalope) during this installation.

First install Ruby and it's associated packages.

sudo apt-get install ruby-full

Next install the native SQlite3 libraries and command line tools.

sudo apt-get install sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev

Next install some native xml processing libraries used by webrat.

sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev libxslt-dev

Next install Git

sudo apt-get install git-core

Next install the tools necessary to build native rubygem extensions.

sudo apt-get install ruby-dev build-essential

Next install RubyGems from source because the Ubuntu packages are usually not current. I also prefer to install RubyGems into my $HOME directory because mixing source packages in with distribution managed packages is generally a bad idea.

wget -c http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/45905/rubygems-1.3.1.tgz
tar xvzf rubygems-1.3.1
cd rubygems-1.3.1
ruby setup.rb --prefix=$HOME/.rubygems --no-format-executable

Once that's done you need to set some environment variables so that; Ruby can find the gems library, RubyGems can find the gem repository and executable gems will be in the $PATH. Add the following to the file $HOME/.bashrc

export RUBYLIB=$HOME/.rubygems/lib
export GEM_HOME=$HOME/.rubygems/gems
export PATH=$HOME/.rubygems/bin:$GEM_HOME/bin:$PATH

Then make sure the RubyGems library is up-to-date and install all the necessary gems.

gem update --system
gem install rake rails rspec-rails cucumber webrat sqlite3-ruby

If you want to double check your installation you can try the following...

ruby --version
gem --version
rails --version
spec --version
cucumber --version