After contemplating modifying my Mac to run Ruby on Rails I decided against any system modifications. The main reason is any documentation on the web regarding installing Rails on the Mac was a little too out dated for my liking and very little support.

So what was I to do? Well I decided that using Locomotive from http://locomotive.raaum.org/ was going to be the safest and easiest option and I wasn’t wrong. Installing Locomotive was super easy and all I needed to do was download it, mount the dmg file and drag the Locomotive Icon into my Applications folder and Bingo! Ruby on Rails is ready to go.

The only thing to keep in mind is that you need to make sure you use the open up any terminals from within the Locomotive interface which is again pretty easy to remember. Locomotive at the time of this post uses the lighttpd web server by default when starting the web server using the command ruby script/server. If you prefer you can use the Webrick webserver with Locomotive by forcing it ruby script/server webrick. Supposedly Webrick is better but I’m no expert so I’m just using Webrick for any development.

The only other thing to keep in mind with Locomotive is that if you want to do more robust database work you’ll need to have MySQL installed on the Mac as the databases shipped with Locomotive aren’t really for a production environment.