Installing Ruby on Rails on Mac

Staring this series on my journey of learning Ruby on Rails has been challenging.  Why is it that as soon as you make a commitment to spend your "free time" doing something it seems all your "free time" is gone?  The good news is I have an amazing wife who is understanding and has helped me continue moving forward with my goal to learn Ruby on Rails.

The first thing I needed to do was install Ruby on my Macbook Pro.  Yes, even though I am a Microsoft developer by day I only own Macs.  I made the transition around 6 years ago after building my own PCs since I was in high school but that is another topic for another blog post.

All Macs come with Ruby installed and since I recently upgraded to OS X Mavericks Ruby version 2.0.0 was already installed.  So my first step was complete or so I thought.

Using this Ruby Mac Install video as my guide I started installing the following:

1. Install git v1.8.3.4
• I already had git installed and a nice prompt setup thanks to my good friend David Hudson.  Here is a picture of it:

• Feel free to go to my github repository and copy my prompt logic from the bash_profile that is checked in there if you would like a prompt like this.
2. Install curl v7.30.0
3. Install rvm v1.23.15
• Used this command: \curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash

• Next use this command to install requirements for rvm based on the rvm website's install instructions: rvm requirements

• Be sure that the [[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && source "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" is in your ~/.bash_profile file


4. Install ruby v2.0.0-p247 
• I thought since ruby was already installed on my Mac I could skip the step in the video to install ruby using rvm install 1.9.2.  So even though I didn't discover this until the step in the video to create a gemset I put this here so you knew you needed to install ruby using this command: rvm install ruby



5. Create a gemset in rvm for this tutorial



6. Install rails v4.0.1 - decided to use 4.0.1 based on the Ruby on Rails blog.
• Rails can be installed using this command:  gem install rails --version 4.0.1



• During rails install there were several ...unable to convert "\x89" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF8 for... error messages.  A quick google search found this stackoverflow question and answer.  This suggested that I needed to update my version of rdoc and then regenerate all my documents with the newer version of rdoc.  Here is the screenshot of the commands:

Now that I have ruby, rails, and a few other necessary tools installed I plan to spend some time over the next few weeks learning the ruby syntax and how to build a simple application in ruby on rails.

Until next time continue learning!

A .NET Developer Learns Ruby on Rails Series

I have been developing business applications using Microsoft technologies for over 12 years and really enjoy working with them.  However, learning a new language has been on my mind for some time and this weekend I decided to start that process.

This is the first in a series of posts that will capture my journey of learning Ruby on Rails as a C# .NET developer and setting up a development environment on my Macbook Pro.

Here is a list of resources that are being used to learn Ruby on Rails:

1. Installing Ruby On Rails On A Mac blog post by Bret McGowen
2. Ruby on Rails Tutorial installation video by rubyonrailstutorial
3. Ruby on Rails Tutorial book by Michael Hartl
4. Ruby on Rails - A Jumpstart for .NET Developers pluralsight video by Dustin Davis

As I continue to learn and develop, I will be adding to this list other resources and refer to in in the coming posts.

If you are currently learning a new language and have any tips please post a comment or send me an email with your advice to paul [dot] gower [at] gmail [dot] com.