I’ve heard people describe frustrations they had in getting Rails 3 setup on Ubuntu 10.04 with Ruby 1.9.2. I’m going to outline the steps I’ve taken to do this. Let’s get started installing RVM.

It should be noted that I created a fresh slice on my Rackspace Cloud account to create this tutorial. And I’m assuming you’ve already setup SSH.

Alright, so lets confirm we don’t have ruby installed

Cool, nada. Let’s grab the basic dependencies

Now we’ll install RVM as per their instructions

http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/rvm/install/

The last part in there about the .bashrc file is important! Using your editor of choice, open the .bashrc file that resides in your user directory.

You need to replace the line that says

[ -z "$PS1" ] && return

with

if [[ -n "$PS1" ]]; then

Now add this to the last line of the file

if [[ -s $HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm ]] ; then source $HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm ; fi

fi

And yes there needs to be that last fi as it closes the one we added earlier. Save this file with our changes. Now we can check if RVM is setup correctly.

If this doesn’t work you may have to source your .bashrc file to have it reloaded by the current terminal session

After running `rvm notes` if it gives you installation notes about RVM then you’re good to continue, otherwise double check you edited your .bashrc file correctly.

In the notes output RVM tells you what packages you’re gonna need to install for various flavors of Ruby. Since we’re going with 1.9.2 we want the packages it lists under the MRI & ree section. Let’s install those now.

Now we can look at all the RVM known Ruby packages

Next we install the version we want and set it as the default. You’re gonna see RVM install ruby-1.8.7-p302 first, be patient as it will need to also install rubygems-1.3.7, before it finally gets to that 1.9.2.

Good to go.

Getting a local development environment setup to run Sphinx on your Mac is pretty easy. You can boil it down to the following quick commands.

This assumes you’re using a default MySQL installation. If however you’re like me and using MySQL installed from macports, you’ll need to pass the location of the MySQL configuration directories to Sphinx. The configure command would then change like so:

On a side note, Sphinx 1.10-beta has also just recently been released (July 10′). This release has real-time indexes support, a welcome addition I have been waiting for. Definately check it out.

Alright, so you’ve switched to using rvm but when you run cmd+r on a Ruby file in TextMate you’re still using your old system install of Ruby… Luckily it only takes a few easy steps to setup TextMate to use your rvm environment.

1) First make sure your install of TextMate if updated
Textmate -> Preferences -> Software Update -> Check Now

2) Next make sure all your bundles are up to date. The creator of rvm, Waynee Seguin, provides a small bash script to automate this process. You can check it out at this GitHub gist

3) Now get the rvm name of the Ruby version you want to use in TextMate. In my case I’m going to use my currently selected version “ruby-1.8.7-tv1_8_7_174″

4) Then run the rvm command to wrap this ruby version for TextMate

5) Now set a TM_RUBY variable in your TextMate Preferences
Textmate -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Shell Variables

To the wrapper command generated by rvm for you, in my case it was found here:

/Users/cirish/.rvm/bin/textmate_ruby

6) Since TextMate will use it’s own builder, by removing it, we can use TM_RUBY as described above.

7) Last but not least, quit TextMate and re-open it to load these settings. You should now be all good

Recently I switched from using my local ruby install to using RVM for managing all my ruby installations. RVM is pretty awesome and I highly recommend it. I went ahead and installed a few versions of ruby that I’d like to use including, ruby 1.8.7 (for work projects) and 1.9.2 (for playing with rails 3).

I came across an issue though with my 1.8.7 install when trying to run a rake db:migrate:reset command with my current work project. It was along the lines of this:

Well that’s no bueno. It turns out that this is happening because, I have two openssl installations. A system one and other that I installed through macports. The reason the bus error is being thrown is that my eventmachine gem wasn’t compiled with the same openssl lib as my ruby 1.8.7 install. We can confirm this by running the following:

At this point you could either recompile ruby and point it to the correct openssl lib or recompile eventmachine to use the system’s openssl. Since this was a new ruby install anyways, I chose to just recompile ruby.

Now let’s check the install again

Fixed

This is more of a reminder to myself than anything. To install the mysql gem on OS X Leopard and use a macports MySQL install.

First remove any previously installed mysql gem

Then install, giving the correct Leopard archflag and macports mysql_config directory

Installing RMagick on OS X has at times been really smooth for me, and other times, a royal pain in the ass. The issues usually come from having to get ImageMagick installed, but I’ve also had problems with the RMagick gem not being able to build the native extensions. I’ve successfully installed ImageMagick by using MacPorts and by compiling the sources by hand. Hopefully, some of these tips will help you with your installation if a problem occurs.

Tip #1: Keep MacPorts and your installed packages up to date!

MacPorts allows for easy installation of packages. But beware, MacPort’s packages are a bit of a dependency nightmare at times. If your installed packages are old and you use them to compile new packages, things can get messed up in the linking/compiling process, or simply just be completely incompatible. Be sure to run these commands often and always before you trying installing/upgrading anything.

Tip #2: MacPorts isn’t your only option

There are other’s out there that have felt the install pain. I came across this installer script that’s well maintained and as of this writing has been updated to work with ImageMagick-6.6.1-5

Simply grab it with Git

I’ve also heard good things about the OS X homebrew package management system, but have no personal experience in using it. Check it out here, and give it a go if it sounds up your alley.

http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/

Tip #3: Ask for help

Check the Installation FAQS
They have solutions for some of the more common issues that tend to happen
http://rmagick.rubyforge.org/install-faq.html#loaderror

Search Online
Take any error messages you receive and try googling for answers to them. You can usually find blog posts from other people that have run into the same issues as you. Hit up the mailing lists or you can even send an email to the project maintainers at rmagick@rubyforge.org

Tip #4: Use the verbose flag when building the gem

This will show you what’s going on as far as the gem building making external requests for libs, what’s building/being written, and that can give you more details than just what the simple stacktrace will show you, when things go wrong.

Tip #5: Be sure to test it after successful install

As noted on the RMagick site, the “Successfully installed” message does not mean that RMagick was successfully installed. The RMagick installation can encounter error conditions that gem can’t detect. The following irb session is a better indicator of a successful install.