The other day I wanted to setup ruby on rails server on Ubuntu for some experimentation. After some trial and error and a few google searches – I was able to get the server running on Ubuntu. Following are the steps that worked for me on Ubuntu 10.04

Step 1 – Install ruby

Ruby is the object oriented language based on which the web framework called rails has been built.

sudo apt-get install ruby-full build-essential

Step 2 – Check ruby installation

ruby -v
ruby -ropenssl -rzlib -rreadline -e "puts :Hello"

Example output of above two commands is as given below.

$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.7 (2010-01-10 patchlevel 249) [i486-linux]
$ ruby -ropenssl -rzlib -rreadline -e "puts :Hello"
Hello
$

Step 3 – Install Gems

Gems is a kind of package manager for Ruby.

sudo apt-get install rubygems

Step 4 – Install Rails

sudo apt-get install rails

Step 5 – Install Sqlite3

Rails is pre-configured to use sqlite3. However, you need to download and install it.

sudo apt-get install sqlite3

Step 6 – Create sample application

rails myrailsapp

This creates a folder myrailsapp in the directory from where it is run.

Step 7 – Run the Ruby on Rails server

cd myrailsapp/
ruby script/server

Example output of this command is as given below

ruby script/server
=> Booting WEBrick...
=> Rails 2.2.3 application started on http://127.0.0.1:3000
=> Ctrl-C to shutdown server; call with --help for options
[2010-07-16 19:56:59] INFO  WEBrick 1.3.1
[2010-07-16 19:56:59] INFO  ruby 1.8.7 (2010-01-10) [i486-linux]
[2010-07-16 19:56:59] INFO  WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=13936 port=3000

Step 8 – Validate Server installation by accessing through web browser

Open the web browser and access the URL http://localhost:3000/. If everything is installed fine, you should get a page opened with content similar to snapshot given below.

If you are interested in some further information on the individual steps and their meaning, you may refer to the Rails installation on Linux Wiki, from which I derived most of the above steps.

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