Chapter 1. Starting Up Ruby on Rails What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. T. S. Eliot Before you can use Rails, you have to install it. Even if it’s already installed on your computer, you may need to consider upgrading it. In this chapter, we’ll take a look at some ways of installing Ruby, Rails, and the supporting infrastructure. Please feel free to jump to whatever pieces of this section interest you and skip past those that don’t. Once the software is working, we’ll generate the basic Rails application, which will at least let you know if Rails is working. However you decide to set up Rails, in the end you’re going to have a structure like that shown in Figure 1-1. Figure 1-1. The many components of a Rails installation NOTE All of these options are free. You don’t need to spend any money to use Rails, unless maybe you feel like buying a nice text editor. If You Run Windows, You’re Lucky Windows users have two options for getting a basic installation of Rails and supporting tools—everything you need to use this book—far more easily than anyone else: EngineYard’s RailsInstaller and Bitnami’s Ruby Stack. Each of these installers provides all the key components in a one-click installation. Visit the site and download the installer; after that, you should be ready to move ahead to “Starting Up Rails”. Really, it’s that easy! (Well, except that you may have to tell Windows Defender not to block the port Rails uses to present the site. It’s also possible that you’ll have to install developer tools on newer versions of Windows.) Rails on Windows might be considered a bridge to full Rails development. You will find that many gems do not work on Windows, so if you want to take the next step in Rails development, consider moving to OS X or Linux operating systems. Ubuntu is a wonderful OS; a dual-boot environment with Windows is a good way to get started using Linux while not entirely cutting ties with Windows. NOTE As this book was going to print, RailsInstaller included installs for Windows and OS X along with the MySQL database. Bitnami offers installers for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and includes both MySQL and Postgres databases with its install. IN DEFENSE OF WINDOWS When I was planning my first Rails class at Asheville- Buncombe Technical Community College during the summer of 2014, I initially planned to require students to use either Mac or Linux for their Rails environment. If they were Windows users, then I would require they install Virtualbox and Vagrant to run a Linux environment in Windows (still not a bad option, by the way). By God they WILL get the full Rails development experience! I told myself. However, after some reflection, I was inclined to change my thinking on this matter. It’s foolish for us as Rails apologists to say, “We have this great web development framework. It’s fast, flexible, has great support…but sorry, Windows users, you have to use either Mac or Linux to join the club.” That’s just plain wrong and flies in the face of the inclusivity and diverse nature the Rails community has always embraced. Getting Started at the Command Line Installing Rails by hand requires installing Ruby (preferably 2.2.2 or later), installing Gems, and then installing Rails. You will eventually also need to install SQLite, MySQL, or another relational database, though SQLite is already present on OS X and in many Linux distributions. Ruby comes standard on a number of Linux and OS X platforms. To see whether it’s there, and what version it has, enter ruby -v at the command prompt. You’ll want Ruby 2.2.2 or later, so you may need to update it to a more recent version: On OS X, the preinstalled version of Ruby will vary widely depending on your OS X version. The following table summarizes which Ruby versions are included. OS X version Ruby version included Yosemite (10.10) and Mavericks (10.9) Ruby 2.0.0 Snow Leopard (10.6), Lion (10.7), and Mountain Lion (10.8) Ruby 1.8.7 Leopard (10.5) Ruby 1.8.6 Older versions Ruby 1.8.2 If you’re on Tiger (10.4) or an earlier version of OS X, you’ll need to update Ruby itself, a challenge that’s beyond the scope of this book. You may want to investigate the Homebrew guide. For a more comprehensive installation, check out the excellent tutorials from RailsGirls. (You should ignore the versions of Rails installed with OS X—they’re guaranteed to be out of date. You’ll need to update Ruby to version 2.2.2 to use Rails 5.) Most distributions of Linux include Ruby, but you’ll want to use your package manager to make sure it’s updated to 2.2.2. Some, notably Ubuntu and Debian, will name the gem command gem1.9. For Windows, unless you’re a hardened tinkerer, it’s much easier to use RailsInstaller or Bitnami. If you’re feeling strong, the one-click RubyInstaller is probably your easiest option, though there are other alternatives, including Cygwin, which brings a lot of the Unix environment to Windows. A saner long-term approach to installing Ruby and Rails includes also installing rvm, the Ruby version manager, which frees you from having to worry about what version of Ruby your system decided it should have as well as giving you better options for managing a clean work environment. (It was created by Wayne E. Seguin, the same person who created RailsInstaller.) If that doesn’t seem right to you, you can also find out more on how to install Ruby on a variety of platforms at the Ruby website. NOTE If rvm isn’t for you, you may also want to explore rbenv, a much smaller and simpler approach to switching between versions of Ruby. RubyGems (often just called Gems) is also starting to come standard on a number of platforms and has shipped with OS X versions since Leopard (10.5). However, if you need to install Gems, see the RubyGems User Guide’s instructions. WARNING If you use MacPorts, apt-get, or a similar package installer, you may want to use it only to install Ruby, and then proceed from the command line. You certainly can install Gems and Rails with these tools, but Gems can update itself, which can make for very confusing package update issues. Once you have RubyGems installed, Rails and its many dependencies are just a command away (though the output has grown more verbose with every version of Rails): marklocklear$ gem install rails Fetching: i18n-0.7.0.gem (100%) Successfully installed i18n-0.7.0 Fetching: thread_safe-0.3.5.gem (100%) Successfully installed thread_safe-0.3.5 Fetching: tzinfo-1.2.2.gem (100%) Successfully installed tzinfo-1.2.2 Fetching: concurrent-ruby-1.0.2.gem (100%) Successfully installed concurrent-ruby-1.0.2 Fetching: activesupport-5.0.0.gem (100%) Successfully installed activesupport-5.0.0 Fetching: rack-2.0.1.gem (100%) Successfully installed rack-2.0.1 Fetching: rack-test-0.6.3.gem (100%) Successfully installed rack-test-0.6.3 Fetching: mini_portile2-2.1.0.gem (100%) Successfully installed mini_portile2-2.1.0 Installing ri documentation for sprockets- rails-3.1.1 Parsing documentation for rails-5.0.0 Installing ri documentation for rails-5.0.0 ... 37 gems installed You may need to use sudo, which gives your command the power of the root (administrative) account, if you’re working in an environment that requires root access for the installation; otherwise, you can just type gem install rails. That will install the latest version of Rails, which may be more recent than 5.0.1, as well as all of its dependencies. gem install rails will install the latest official release of Rails, which at present is 5.0.1. It will not install any Rails betas. (To see which version of Rails is installed, enter rails -v at the command line.) You may also need to install the sqlite3 gem, which isn’t automatically installed by the Rails gem but is needed for development. That’s gem install sqlite3. If you’re ever wondering which gems (and which versions of gems) are installed, type gem list --local. For more information on gems, just type gem, or visit the Ruby Gems website. NOTE You can see the documentation that gems have installed by running the command gem server, and visiting the URL (usually http://localhost:8808) that command reports. When you’re done, you can turn off the server with Ctrl- C. Once you have Rails installed, you can create a Rails application easily from the command line. Here’s what it looks like in its extended glory, but you don’t need to read it every time: marklocklear$ rails new hello01 create create README.md create Rakefile create config.ru create .gitignore create Gemfile create app create app/assets/config/manifest.js create app/assets/javascripts/application.js create app/assets/javascripts/cable.js create app/assets/stylesheets/application.css create app/channels/application_cable/channel.rb create app/channels/application_cable/connection.rb create app/controllers/application_controller.rb create app/helpers/application_helper.rb create app/jobs/application_job.rb create app/mailers/application_mailer.rb create app/models/application_record.rb create app/views/layouts/application.html.erb create app/views/layouts/mailer.html.erb create app/views/layouts/mailer.text.erb create app/assets/images/.keep create app/assets/javascripts/channels create app/assets/javascripts/channels/.keep create app/controllers/concerns/.keep create app/models/concerns/.keep create bin create bin/bundle create bin/rails create bin/rake create bin/setup create bin/update create config create config/routes.rb create config/application.rb create config/environment.rb create config/secrets.yml