Installing Rails on OS X

There are two approaches to installing Rails on OS X. One is to use a package manager (typically MacPorts). The other is to do a traditional “install from source.”

There are two canonical descriptions of these routes. For the MacPorts version, folks turn to James Duncan Davidson's blog post.

For the do it yourself route, people favor Dan Benjamin's description. And the good news is that today Dan has released a totally updated guide to installing Ruby, Rails, Mongrel, and MySQL on OS X.

Which to use? The choice is yours. The MacPorts route is easier, handles dependencies automatically, and makes it a snap to update (but only after the MacPorts repository has itself been updated). The source route gives you more control over what is going on.

Comments

[Mark Ivey]

Don't forget Locomotive! It's the fastest way I know to get a Rails development environment on any platform.

[Todd Werth]

I created a screencast that takes you from a fresh install of OS X Tiger to Ruby, on to Rails using DarwinPorts (MacPorts).

http://www.infinitered.com/blog/?p=6

I noticed a lot of people were having problems getting setup, and many guides would miss little things that left people scratching their heads. I figured I'd show them without editing anything out. I stop at Rails, so I didn't install any databases, or Mongrel or anything, but I hope someone finds it useful.

[Cody Robbins]

Sakuzaku has a script to automatically download and install the software mentioned in Dan's Hivelogic tutorial. (Actually, it follows the tutorial almost verbatim.)

http://blog.wearesakuzaku.com/16-building-ruby-rails-subversion-mongrel-and-mysql-on-mac-os-x/

If you're not using a package manager like MacPorts, it might save you some time getting set up — especially if you have to install Rails on multiple machines.