Ruby on Rails Ubuntu 8.10: Installing Rails

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After creating and launching a VirtualMachine on a Vista Host and installing Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, I executed the following steps to configure my Ubuntu server for Ruby on Rails.

After trying (and failing at the implementation of) several other sets of Ubuntu/Rails howto guides, most of my inspiration came from a Ubuntu/Ruby on Rails install guide that actually works.

The Steps

Update aptitude:

sudo aptitude update

Run any distribution upgrades: this step downloaded approximately 100MB and took a few minutes to install;

sudo aptitude --assume-yes dist-upgrade

Now that we are up to date, get a few Rails prerequisites:
– build-essential = “Informational list of build-essential packages”
– ruby = An interpreter of object-oriented scripting language Ruby
– ri = Ruby Interactive reference
– rdoc = Generate documentation from ruby source files
– irb = Interactive Ruby (irb)

sudo aptitude --assume-yes install build-essential
sudo aptitude --assume-yes install \
  irb \
  irb1.8 \
  libmysql-ruby \
  libmysql-ruby1.8 \
  libopenssl-ruby \
  libopenssl-ruby1.8 \
  libreadline-ruby1.8 \
  libruby1.8 \
  rdoc \
  rdoc1.8 \
  ri \
  ri1.8 \
  ruby \
  ruby1.8 \
  ruby1.8-dev

Download the latest gems, manually, because aptitude doesn’t appear to be able to get the latest version, etc.

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/45905/rubygems-1.3.1.tgz
tar xzvf rubygems-1.3.1.tgz
cd rubygems-1.3.1
sudo ruby setup.rb
cd ..
rm -f rubygems-1.3.1.tgz 
rm -rf rubygems-1.3.1

Create symlinks: the installer didn’t do it for me, so i had to create them manually;

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/local/bin/gem
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/ruby1.8 /usr/local/bin/ruby
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/rdoc1.8 /usr/local/bin/rdoc
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/ri1.8 /usr/local/bin/ri
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/irb1.8 /usr/local/bin/irb

Install rails (takes a while…no status):

sudo gem install rails

Install other gems of interest:

sudo gem install rake
sudo gem install capistrano
sudo gem install capistrano-ext
sudo gem install ruby-debug
sudo gem install term-ansicolor
sudo gem install mongrel
sudo gem install annotate-models

Install apache: I’m not totally confident in the necessity of this step since we installed Apache during the Ubuntu install process… but what do i know?

sudo aptitude --assume-yes install \
  apache2-mpm-worker \
  apache2-prefork-dev \
  comerr-dev \
  libapr1-dev \
  libaprutil1-dev \
  libdb4.6-dev \
  libexpat1-dev \
  libkadm55 \
  libkrb5-dev \
  libldap2-dev \
  libmysqlclient15-dev \
  libpcre3-dev \
  libpcrecpp0 \
  libpq-dev \
  libsqlite3-dev \
  libssl-dev \
  uuid-dev \
  zlib1g-dev

My Apache install was not without incident. Although everything appears to be working, I did get the following reponse during the install:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  libapache2-mod-php5: 
    Depends: apache2-mpm-prefork (> 2.0.52) but it is not installable or
             apache2-mpm-itk but it is not installable
The following actions will resolve these dependencies:
Remove the following packages:
  libapache2-mod-php5
  php5-mysql