What to install for Rails development?

Rails
1

Hi, is there a list which helps new people as existing people to RoR
in regards to what to install and when to install it? I’m just
looking for a list must have components because I’m really lost at
this point with all the announcements. Finally, my hosting company is
currentlyhas the following version of rails installed:

rails 0.13.1 [rdoc] [www] - depends on actionmailer, actionpack,
actionwebservice, activerecord, activesupport, rake.
Web-application framework with template engine, control-flow layer, and
ORM.
Executable is rails.

rails 1.0.0 [rdoc] [www] - depends on actionmailer, actionpack,
actionwebservice, activerecord, activesupport, rake.
Web-application framework with template engine, control-flow layer, and
ORM.
Executable is rails.

Now, is it possible to target different versions of rails locally and
deploy the one that’s appropriate for your hosting company? If so,
could someone direct me to the instructions to do so? It seems that I
may need to reinstall rails 1.0 but I’m not sure what’s the procedure
in this regard. Thus, if someone can assist, it would be GREATLY
helpful because I need to produce a prototype within the next 7 days
and I need to be able to sell RoR as a development platform for future
web applications. At this time, they are using .Net stuff and I have
been struggling with just getting SQL Server 2005 Express installed
and I see GREAT productivity gains by moving to Rails.

Thanks in advance,

-Conrad

2

On Friday 07 April 2006 11:53, Conrad T. wrote:

helpful because I need to produce a prototype within the next 7 days
and I need to be able to sell RoR as a development platform for future
web applications. At this time, they are using .Net stuff and I have
been struggling with just getting SQL Server 2005 Express installed
and I see GREAT productivity gains by moving to Rails.

Thanks in advance,

-Conrad

As for the software you need, it should be easy to find on the internet.
In
short, first you need ruby (1.8.4 or higher recommended. 1.8.3 doesn’t
work,
1.8.2 still does, but not for long). Then, depening on if you want to
install
all the rails packages yourself/or (if using Linux) your package
manager, you
want to install gems. Meaning, don’t install gems when you install the
packages yourself. But I recommend using gems. When it’s installed,
simply do
“gems install rails --include-dependencies” (or something) (assuming you
have
a command line OS…), and install a proper db backend (“postgres”
recommended
when using postgres, instead ruby-postgres).

As for the provider’s rails version, it’s very old. Rails provides the
ability
to freeze gems, meaning you install the rails version you have on your
computer in the project directory. When using SVN as version control,
you can
also include an external repository in /vender. For our project, we have
the
1.1 tag of rails as external repository in our project dir in /vendor.
The SVN
method is recommended, because the “rails:freeze:gems” is quite messy,
especially when you unfreeze it again (it throws away all your svn or
cvs info
in that dir, meaning you have to do a lot of damage control).

I hope this is of help.