Ask A Question

Notifications

You’re not receiving notifications from this thread.

Suggested changes to Ubuntu 18.04 documentation

Zachary A Skaggs asked in Site Feedback

I am totally new to Ruby and started with the installation documentation here (https://gorails.com/setup/ubuntu/18.04) on a totally fresh install of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

This isn't a complaint, I was able to work through these issues, but someone with less Ubuntu experience might not be able to so I wanted to propose some changes if that's alright.

First, git is not installed out of the box so the repo cannot be cloned without it.

sudo apt-get install git

Once rbenv is installed, trying to install Ruby will give you a compile error unless we also

sudo apt-get install build-essentials

When installing the compiler, we'll be told there are some extra missing dependencies

sudo apt-get install -y libssl-dev libreadline-dev zlib1g-dev

After installing Ruby, Rails, and MySQL, creating the database with the given command will give an error (even without setting a password.) Setting a MySQL password and modifying the config/database.yml file will resolve this issue.

Finally, when trying to run rails server in the last step, the command will fail unless nodejs is also installed

sudo apt-get install nodejs

And then will fail again without the (updated) version of Yarn. The default in the Ubuntu repo is not a recent enough version, so we need to add the Yarn repo, update, and install:

curl -sS https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/pubkey.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/ stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/yarn.list
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install yarn

Once the above are followed, then the server will finally start and you're ready to begin!

Reply

The "Installing Ruby" step covers installing git, node, yarn, build essentials and the libssl, libreadline and zlib libraries. Sounds like you might have missed those steps.

Reply

Wow! So it does! That's so strange that I somehow missed a whole section. Even more strange that I'm apparently so tired I documented it before double checking the workflow. So sorry! Thank you, I'm so excited to get started here. :)

Reply

haha! ive done that many times myself. Coding while tired doesnt work out very well.

Maybe a cool feature to add is checkboxes so you can see which steps youve completed!

Reply

Hey @chris I tried the setup again (using a VM this time, dual boot was being a pain), this time using Postgres, and it seems Ubuntu 18.04 doesn't have support for postgres 11 out of the box.

I double checked the doc this time (lol), and I wasn't able to find these steps...these helped me successfully install Postgres:

wget --quiet -O - https://www.postgresql.org/media/keys/ACCC4CF8.asc | sudo apt-key add -

RELEASE=$(lsb_release -cs)
echo "deb http://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt/ ${RELEASE}"-pgdg main | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pgdg.list

Once the above were input, I was able to continue with the Postgres installation. :)

Reply
Join the discussion
Create an account Log in

Want to stay up-to-date with Ruby on Rails?

Join 81,842+ developers who get early access to new tutorials, screencasts, articles, and more.

    We care about the protection of your data. Read our Privacy Policy.

    Screencast tutorials to help you learn Ruby on Rails, Javascript, Hotwire, Turbo, Stimulus.js, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Ubuntu, and more.

    © 2024 GoRails, LLC. All rights reserved.