Let usr/local Save Your Rails Environment

If your looking at doing a ruby on rails installation on your Mac, make sure you understand where all these new applications are being installed on your system and how to make your rails installation unbreakable.

Many developers from beginners to advanced are trying ruby on rails. If your like me, you’ll be doing most of your rails coding on a Mac. If you were a Windows user who has recently switched to the Mac for Rails development, you might find the amount of terminal usage in Rails development a little intimidating.

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to work with a corporate company running UNIX so I had the opportunity to learn enough UNIX basics to be reasonably comfortable working with the terminal and the command line in Mac OSX.

If your installing Ruby on Rails on your Mac, then Dan Benjamin of Hivelogic has the best tutorials to get the installation done right. Dan really knows his stuff when it comes to that sometimes terrifying terminal, so you’ll find his installation guides a breath of fresh air.

Before you start that rails installation, I encourage you to read Dan’s article on setting your applications to install in usr/local rather than the default. The more you understand about why things are done the way they are, the easier you’ll find the rest of your rails experience.