Install Ruby on Rails on Mac OS X

Well I’ve now been playing around with Ruby for a month or so and have looked at options on how to install it successfully on my Mac. You’ll find the easiest option is the Easy Rails with Locomotive application that I ended up using because I just wanted something quick and easy.

Locomotive has worked great however I’m still curious about getting Rails setup on my Mac without Locomotive which hasn’t been successful yet, however I’ve compiled a list of online documentation that I have found and listed them below hopefully saving you some time searching. Fortunately Ruby on Rails will be released with Mac OS X Leopard so hopefully all this hassle of finding up to date and relevant documentation on a successful Rails implementation will be a thing of the past.

I did however have a successful install of Ruby on Rails on a PC running Suse Linux 10.1 following Novell’s instructions on Configuring Ruby Rails for Apache on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server which was pretty easy considering I’m hardly a Linux guru but know enough about Unix to get around the terminal environment.

Here is the documentation I have found for installing Ruby on Rails on Mac OS X and I will update it when I found more information to keep it up to date. Keep in mind I haven’t yet been able to successfully install Ruby on Rails following these instructions but if you got a good knowledge of the Unix platform you’ll probably go better than I did.

• Building Ruby, Rails, Mongrel, and MySQL on Mac OS X -(2 Feb 07) This is the latest update from Dan Benjamin of Hivelogic and is a newer version of the next point below because it uses Mongrel instead of FastCGI.
• Building Ruby, Rails, LightTPD, and MySQL on Tiger (2 Dec 05 – a little out dated but it still works. I updated my Mac on 22 Nov 06 with only a few minor issues that weren’t related to the instructions)
• Installing Rails on Mac OS X Tiger (12 July 06 – Updated version, looks ok but haven’t tried it)
• Installing Rails on Mac OS X Tiger (10.4.8) (17 Oct 06 – Update of point above. Haven’t tried it yet either.)

Good Luck!