Professional Ruby on Rails™

A.2. Ruby

The current version of Ruby is 1.8.6. That's the version that should be installed on most recent Linux distributions as well as Mac OS X 10.5.

For Windows, a one-click installer for Ruby 1.8.6 is available at http://rubyinstaller.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl. This installs Ruby, Gems, Rake, and a slew of other commonly used Ruby tools.

Under Linux distributions that support APT, the following command works:

% sudo apt-get install ruby irb rdoc

A source download is available at www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads. This distribution contains instructions for building from source. (Dan Benjamin's page noted earlier also has instructions for OS X, and the make/install steps should work for Linux as well.)

The Windows one-click installer includes RubyGems, as does OS X Leopard. For other platforms, head to http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=126 and download the most recent version (0.9.4 as I write this). Unpack the download and run ruby setup.rb from the top level of the downloaded files.

The developer release of Rails 1.9 is brand new as this book heads for production, and Rails is rapidly being patched to accommodate it. While not recommended for production web sites in the immediate future, it's worth keeping an eye on for the future of Ruby development as well as for its promised performance updates.