Hi Krfg, Welcome to Ruby on Rails. I am alost got started last week. I setup my development box on ArchLinux and two days back on OSX. Generally speaking, whenever I started with new language or framework, I prefer to check the official docs as it is mostly the accurate one (which is you are already doing). For example:
1. For RoR 4: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html#installing-rails 2. For RoR 5 Best: http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html#installing-rails I agree with you if sometimes you find official docs does not have enough details, usually because the writer already been doing this for a while and some small details becomes second habit for him/her. Please find my comments inline On Saturday, February 20, 2016 at 3:33:34 PM UTC+1, krfg wrote: > > Having finished the Michael Hartl Rails tutorial, which uses Cloud9 as > development environment, I would like to redo it configuring my machine > (Ubuntu 14.04 LTS) as a local development environment. > Thats awesome, doing it yourself is the best way to learn about something new. I respect c9 and all those other SaaS/PaaS services however configuring locally for learning is the best way. Sometimes you get frustrated when configuring something for the first time, I remember this happens to me every-time, for example two months ago when I was trying to install Gentoo from scratch. > > I am determined to use *Atom* + Terminal, and I would really appreciate > some help in determining what remains of all the necessary software to be > installed in my computer, because the tutorial is not much helpful in this > respect. > Atom is cool tool to start with and I guess you found your way in installing it. GUI Terminal is of course already installed (most of the time) . > Before Rails I decided to study some Ruby. > In the official Ruby web page > <https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/installation/#railsinstaller>, > Bitnami RubyStack is recommended as a complete development environment for > Rails. Since I planned to study Ruby for Rails, I installed Bitnami > RubyStack: would you recommend to keep it? Or, as I suspect, it would be > better to install each component separately? > I personally would install each component separately for learning and also because most of time such fat installers install things that you will not be using at least when you are getting started. > The official Rails web page used to provide a link > <http://guides.railsgirls.com/install#setup-for-linux> for those > interested in how to install the Ruby on Rails development environment: > would that be a recommendable solution? > I checked this link, for ubuntu it is using a rails-install-ubuntu.sh which is just a shell script the automate running multiple commands. Again doing it yourself is better for learning, you can read the script and try to understand what each command does before executing that command manually. > Combining my brief experience as a student and The RailsApps Project > suggestions <http://railsapps.github.io/installrubyonrails-ubuntu.html>, > I suppose I need the following applications: > > - A *database*: the Rails Tutorial uses *SQLite* but Heroku recommends > to use *PostgreSQL* also in development (Heroku uses PostgreSQL). I am > undecided because on the one hand I completed the course without noticing > any incompatibility between SQLite and PostgreSQL, and Michael Hartl says > that SQLite is *much* easier than PostgreSQL. On the other hand I do > not know the limits of compatibility between the two databases, so I would > not like to find myself into trouble. > > It depends on what do you want to achieve. If you are just installing things to learn about RoR, then definitely go with SQLite as it is easier to setup and satisfy the needs. If you are planning to build a production-ready application then the choice of database matters: 1. SQLite: suitable for storing small things, could be configurations, or small apps where each user data is stored in separate SQLite file. Mostly you want to avoid SQLite for concurrence access for write due to locking will become a problem. 2. Relational database like PostgreSQL or MySQL for bigger projects where you are looking for a trustworthy database than can serve even the scale of Facebook. 3. NoSQL databases where you application model is less relational (note you will have to program the relation in the code) or the user perceived performance is really critical, although I could argue that you can still achieve comparable results with relational databases (of-course by using some more advanced techniques, or just extra hardware) In short, if you are just learning go with SQLite. > > - *RVM*: will I need RVM for switching between Ruby versions? The > RailsApps project recommends it. For the tutorial, it was more determinant > the possibility to choose the Rails version than that of Ruby. > > It is good to start with some version manager, because in many cases the default .deb package that you get from apt-get is not always the latest version due to 14.04 is considered a stable LTS version of ubuntu. I personally tried rvm & rbenv, I found it rbenv nicer, although it is just a matter of taste. > > - *Bundler*: is it installed with Ruby of will I need to install it > separately? > > > - *Node.js*: the RailsApps project says that "for development on > Ubuntu Linux it is best to install the Node.js server-side JavaScript > environment". > > I am not sure why do you need Node.js here. If you are planning to do ReactJS or AngularJS (Single-Page-App) then anyway the regular rails way may not be the best, you will need to tweak things. For example in Rails 5, rails-api code got merged with the official release <http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/api_app.html> so that you can drop the 'view' part of your rails app and rely on ReactJS (for example) to give you the view. However if you are getting started with Rails, I suggest to stick with the default setup without the complexity of those awesome front-end frameworks because they are really a different story that you will need to learn at some point. > > - *Web server*: what local web server would you suggest? *WEBrick*? > Apache? The tutorial uses WEBrick. > > For development purposes, WEBrick (Rails 4) or Puma (Rails 5) is good enough. For production deployment you will need another solution like U <https://unicorn.bogomips.org/>nicorn <https://unicorn.bogomips.org/> or uwsgi <https://uwsgi-docs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/RackQuickstart.html>. The idea is you need a web server that works well with the Rack web server interface <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rack_(web_server_interface)>, which is a concept used by other languages as well like Python <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Server_Gateway_Interface> and Perl <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSGI>. Sometimes also you add in front of that an nginx <http://nginx.org/> server. I will not go though more details as I guess is more about to deploy production setup. In short for development locally and getting started stick with the default rails server WEBrick (Rails 4) or Puma (Rails 5) , > > - *Git*: Git is already installed with Ubuntu. Will that be enough? > > > Would you recommend anything else? > Finally, I suppose I will need to find documentation on how to configure > all these applications: do you have any suggestion about that? > > Many thanks in advance > To test setup on ubuntu 14.04 64 LTS <https://vagrantcloud.com/ubuntu/boxes/trusty64>. I installed a vanilla vagrant <https://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html> box. Here the commands I typed to get rails running: # 1. Setup your locale,* I assume the locales already working for you, you can skip this step* $ echo 'LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"' | sudo tee -a /etc/default/locale # 2. Check if ruby installed $ ruby --version ruby 1.9.3p484 (2013-11-22 revision 43786) [x86_64-linux] As I mentioned before, the default ruby version is not the latest, so we could use version manager to get a latest version. You can also do that in other way by importing edge packages for a personal package archive (ppa), however using a version manager is more cool and easier. Although on production I believe you will need to use proper .deb package not a version manager installation. # 3. Check if git installed $ git --version The program 'git' is currently not installed. To run 'git' please ask your administrator to install the package 'git' # 4. Note that installing git from apt-get have the same problem as installing ruby because 14.04 LTS package repository only has stable packages # To install latest git version, you can compile from source code, or find a good ppa with latest git packages. I will go with ppa git-core <https://launchpad.net/~git-core/+archive/ubuntu/ppa> $ sudo apt-add-repository -y ppa:git-core/ppa # 5. Update apt local index $ sudo apt-get update # 6. Install git $ sudo apt-get install -y git # 7. Check git version again $ git --version git version 2.7.1 # 8. Installing rbenv, you can go via ppa path <https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rbenv> but it is not update to date, so I will go with compile from source. # I will assume you have make and gcc installed, otherwise run sudo apt-get install -y build-essential $ git clone https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv $ cd ~/.rbenv && src/configure && make -C src $ echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile && source ~/.bash_profile $ ~/.rbenv/bin/rbenv init $ echo 'eval "$(rbenv init -)"' >> ~/.bash_profile && source ~/.bash_profile -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. 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