This is part 1 in a series of posts in which I’ll chart my progress with the web development framework Ruby on Rails. I have never used Ruby or a web framework, so this should be a worthwhile exercise. I’ll be developing a list sharing web application, and in the process evaluating RoR as an alternative to more traditional web development tools and languages.

Installing the server

I could have taken the easy option here and just typed sudo apt-get install rails on one of my GNU/Linux boxes, but to get the true Rails experience, I decided to go for the Turnkey Linux Rails distro since the RoR wiki suggests it’s ‘One of the easiest ways to get up and running with Ruby on Rails’. 1h30m later I have a fully-fledged web server with a working Rails install and the beginnings of a web app setup. Not bad!

I had a few problems around sqlite. It seems that by default Rails apps (at least the Turnkey version) expect to be using sqlite as their backend. However, neither the sqlite3 gem nor its dependencies were installed in the Turnkey distro. oops! It took a bit of Googling around forums to get things working, but ultimately all it took was:

apt-get install libsqlite3-dev sqlite3
gem install sqlite3-ruby

And then the reassuring welcome screen:

I can’t wait to get stuck in!