Installing Rails on Mac Leopard - Best Approach?

rubyonrails-talk
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I know this has been asked often over the years, looking for the latest best practice..

I'm a total mac noob, have been using windows/cygwin up until now.

Looks like the basic approaches I've seen so far: - Leave the pre-installed ruby 1.8.6 and just update the rails gem - Do your own full blown installation (Hivelogic tutoral) - Use Macports installation - Others??

Mac has there own tutorial on the developer site, but it requires using XCode and I want to use TextMate, so I haven't paid much attention to their instructions.

Advice greatly appreciated, thanks!

Brad

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Brad A wrote:

I know this has been asked often over the years, looking for the latest best practice..

I'm a total mac noob, have been using windows/cygwin up until now.

Welcome to the Mac community! Check out Mac - Official Apple Support for some useful tips.

Looks like the basic approaches I've seen so far: - Leave the pre-installed ruby 1.8.6 and just update the rails gem

That's what I'd advise. There's no reason to do it any other way that I can see, unless you want to try Ruby EE.

[...]

Mac has there own tutorial on the developer site,

No. The company is called Apple. :slight_smile:

but it requires using XCode and I want to use TextMate, so I haven't paid much attention to their instructions.

That's a foolish reason to ignore it. A text editor is a text editor.

But before you blow €39 on TextMate, try jEdit (see http://marnen.livejournal.com for setup info) and/or TextWrangler.

Best,

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Thanks for the input.

I actually used jEdit for a few years when I first started developing in java, but have used Eclipse now for the last 3 or 4 years. The main reason for choosing Textmate over XCode is that there seems to be a lot of contributions from the rails community, as far as snippets, etc, that should make some work more effcient.

I suppose the only real reason I have for not using the Ruby version that is already available is that it's 1.8.6 and my deployment environment (my hosting service), uses 1.8.7. Not too sure if there are any changes between versions that would be significant to me.

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I would recommend getting VMWare or equivalent and re-creating (as closely as possible) your deployment environment on a VM.

Then you can develop natively and test-deploy to your local Linux (assuming!) instance for integration testing before pushing out to production.

FWIW,

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Marnen Laibow-Koser wrote:

Robert Walker wrote: [...]

As for the comment earlier about "blowing" your money on TextMate, I am in complete disagreement. That's the best €39 I think I've ever spent on software.

Um, I meant "blow" in the sense of "spend irreversibly", not in the sense of "waste". I know that TextMate is, by all reports, an excellent program. However, I also know that a lot of Rails developers seem to have tunnel vision when it comes to editors, so I just wanted to point out a couple of free alternatives that the OP could evaluate. Sorry if my choice of words was misleading.

Yea, maybe my comment sounded a bit more harsh than intended. I just wanted to point out that there are sometimes compelling reasons to spend money on good software when it can make you more efficient. That is as opposed to using free software that just gets the job done.

Then I guess I should ask: in your opinion, what makes TextMate worth the money?

In a word, "bundles."

And, the longer form: TextMate gives me exactly what I want in a text editor, which is a feature set designed to help enter code. I'm not talking about assistance entering method names (as in code completion). I really care very little about that. I'm talking about getting help entering code without getting in my way all time with popup menus suggesting things it "thinks" I might want to enter (and getting it wrong about half the time).

Or, getting me stuck with a "beach ball" while it goes off trying to figure out what I might want to enter next, as is the case with the Java based IDE that I'm stuck with in my day job as a Java programmer.

All I can say is, download the 30 day trial of TextMate. Read the docs and really get to know the editor. Chances are, if you're like most of use who have tried it, you'll happily whip out that credit card to buy your very own copy of this wonderful editor.

I know, I sound like a TextMate salesman, but really I'm just a happy customer.

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Not sure if this helps, but Dan from Thoughtbot has a great guide for getting a decent Ruby dev environment set up on Mac OS X Leopard:

http://giantrobots.thoughtbot.com/2009/3/30/2009-rubyist-guide-mac-os-x-development-environment

I'm personally not that big on vim/vi, and I only use Git for tracking some Gems, but there are certainly some benefits to this setup. Hope this helps!

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Thanks to everyone for their input. I decided to just use the default install of ruby and upgrade the rails gem, plus install mysql, Hashbrown on the Mic » Blog Archive » Installing Rails, MySQL on Mac Leopard. Still leaves open using macports or a new complete install in the future.

I downloaded the 30 day trial of textmate and have started working with it. I've seen some screencasts showing some great stuff for ruby/ rails. I'll see if I can get some of that under my belt.

-Brad