Ubuntu, Ruby, RVM, Rails, and You

&#62; Under no circumstance should you install Ruby, Rubygems or any Ruby-related packages from apt-get<p>I really wish the RoR book I was reading had told me that before I spent multiple hours trying to properly setup Rails.

This is a good start for setting up rails on your development box, but when it comes to deploying it to a clean server, just following these instructions will give you a headache fast.<p>This tutorial, and some others on this guys blog helped me do just that. <a href="http://kris.me.uk/2010/08/30/rails3-hosting-all-in-one.html" rel="nofollow">http://kris.me.uk/2010/08/30/rails3-hosting-all-in-one.html</a>

Really good advice about not installing Ruby using apt-get. I forgot and did this a few weeks ago and dropped back to building from source.

It's surprising that with all that talk about how bad packaged ruby is, not many seem to be pushing for automation to fix this. CPAN situation is very similar to gems (apart from the speed of changes in the interpreters). Some perl modules are missing, some outdated, but `dh-make-perl --cpan Module::You::Want` brings you all you need almost every single time. There seems to be an old dh-make-ruby (dead ~2006), dh-make-gem seems to be in the works (early 0.3.0 version available).<p>Even upstream doesn't seem to be interested that much. On the download page, there's:<p>For example, on Debian or Ubuntu apt-get provides an easy and elegant solution: % sudo apt-get install ruby1.9.1-full<p>It definitely is confusing / silly to the outside observer... There's rvm - how hard is it to automate package building reusing it's elements? If it's not - why isn't it done? If it is - why all the packages hate, instead of pressuring upstream to improve the situation?

Actually, this is one of the long lasting issues with RoR: most people want to try it on a recent version, but Linux distros try to package <i></i>stable<i></i> releases instead. You shouldn't blame the distros for not having the absolute bleeding edge version.<p>If really need the absolute latest version of Rails go on, have a separate install compiled from source, but there's no need to be rude with the packagers. I'm trying to learn Rails 3 and I found that JRuby works really fine with Rails 3, and using Warbler gives me nices WAR files to deploy on Tomcat, and I don't mess my default Ruby install.

I also found the following tutorial invaluable for setting up rails on 10.04 (via RailsTutorial.org)<p><a href="http://toranbillups.com/blog/archive/2010/09/01/How-to-install-Rails-3.0-and-Ruby-1.9.2-on-Ubuntu" rel="nofollow">http://toranbillups.com/blog/archive/2010/09/01/How-to-insta...</a>

Absolutely agree. Whenever you google for installing ruby on Ubuntu you get the package version. Also Linode's guides use the packages. RVM offers a nearly effortless solution to manage your rubies - and more importantly manage gemsets which is an awesome feature.<p>Although I had to install more dependencies to get everything to work. I don't remember exactly what problems I had without some of the dependencies, but I had compiled them here: <a href="http://rohitarondekar.com/articles/installing-rails3-beta3-on-ubuntu-using-rvm" rel="nofollow">http://rohitarondekar.com/articles/installing-rails3-beta3-o...</a>

I just did this setup a few days ago, only problem is rvm did not work with root, still uses default ruby, however i suspect i need to configure the PATH<p>In addition I used Passenger as well