Professional Ruby on Rails™

A.1. Platform Notes

Ruby on Rails runs on any platform where Ruby itself runs. Most likely, you'll be running a Linux distrubution, Mac OS X, or Microsoft Windows (XP or Vista). Each platform has a slightly different set of steps to follow. Here are some general notes on each platform.

A.1.1. Linux

All the standalone tools here should be available via the package manager for your Linux distribution — in fact, many of them should be preinstalled as part of the general operating system (OS) installation. For updates, the package installer is your first and easiest choice for getting the program onto your system. All the described Linux tools allow for compilation from source — if you want that option, you'll need to have the standard developer tools such as gcc and make installed.

A.1.2. Mac OS X

If you are running the new Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard version, you're in luck because Ruby 1.8.6 and Rails 1.2.3 are both preinstalled. In addition, the Ruby distribution includes RubyGems and several other popular gems. One thing to keep in mind is that the Ruby installation itself has been patched for better integration with the underlying OS and developer tools. This may be an issue when the time comes to update Ruby. You may also want to run a custom Ruby build, in which case, you should go to the URL in the next paragraph.

If you're on OS X 10.4 Tiger, you need to do some work. The Ruby version that shipped with Tiger was a variant of Ruby 1.8.4, and it had some critical bugs that broke ...