Wrong side of the tracks: Rails on Ubuntu

Sure its not a Mac, but Ubuntu does Rails too!
This is a setup script to get a complete working Ruby on Rails development environment up and working fast. Ubuntu changes far to often to spend a lot of time setting up your development environment. This script is my attempt to solve that issue for myself. Since I maintain some older Rails apps that development environment needs to support many versions of Rails.

If you run it as is, it will install:

Netbeans 6.9.1 (Earlier versions don't support Rails 3)
Ruby 1.8.7
Rubygems 1.3.7
Postgres 8.4
Rails 3
Git
A whack of common gems and their dependancies.


At the moment this setup works well for the type of work I am doing and may work for you as well. If you have preferences for other things edit the script as necessary.

Works with:

Ubuntu Karmic 9.10
Lucid Lynx 10.04 LTS
Maverick Meercat 10.10.


Mike Williamson


How to use it:

Run it like any other script:
Make sure you add execute permissions to it and then run it. Since it is installing stuff you will definitely need to use sudo to run it.

mike@ubuntu:~$ chmod +x wrong_side
mike@ubuntu:~$ sudo ./wrong_side

Postgres is now installed by default. If you want to install mysql instead, run the script with the -d flag:

mike@ubuntu:~$ sudo ./wrong_side -d mysql