Install Ruby On Rails on
Ubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo
A guide to setting up a Ruby on Rails development environment
Operating System
Version
Overview
This will take about 30 minutes.
We will be setting up a Ruby on Rails development environment on Ubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo.
The reason we're going to be using Ubuntu is because the majority of code you write will run on a Linux server. Ubuntu is one of the easiest Linux distributions to use with lots of documentation so it's a great one to start with.
You'll want to download the latest Desktop version here: http://releases.ubuntu.com/19.04/
Some of you may choose to develop on Ubuntu Server so that your development environment matches your production server. You can find it on the same download link above.
Installing Ruby
Choose the version of Ruby you want to install:
The first step is to install some dependencies for Ruby and Rails.
To make sure we have everything necessary for Webpacker support in Rails, we're first going to start by adding the Node.js and Yarn repositories to our system before installing them.
sudo apt install curl
curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_lts.x | sudo -E bash -
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 git-core zlib1g-dev build-essential libssl-dev libreadline-dev libyaml-dev libsqlite3-dev sqlite3 libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev software-properties-common libffi-dev nodejs yarn
Next we're going to be installing Ruby using a version manager called Rbenv.
Installing with rbenv
is a simple two step process. First you install rbenv
, and then ruby-build
:
cd
git clone https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'eval "$(rbenv init -)"' >> ~/.bashrc
exec $SHELL
git clone https://github.com/rbenv/ruby-build.git ~/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
exec $SHELL
To install Ruby and set the default version, we'll run the following commands:
rbenv install 3.2.0
rbenv global 3.2.0
Confirm the default Ruby version matches the version you just installed.
ruby -v
The last step is to install Bundler
gem install bundler
rbenv users need to run rbenv rehash
after installing bundler.
Configuring Git
We'll be using Git for our version control system so we're going to set it up to match our Github account. If you don't already have a Github account, make sure to register. It will come in handy for the future.
Replace my name and email address in the following steps with the ones you used for your Github account.
git config --global color.ui true
git config --global user.name "YOUR NAME"
git config --global user.email "YOUR@EMAIL.com"
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "YOUR@EMAIL.com"
The next step is to take the newly generated SSH key and add it to your Github account. You want to copy and paste the output of the following command and paste it here.
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
Once you've done this, you can check and see if it worked:
ssh -T git@github.com
You should get a message like this:
Hi excid3! You've successfully authenticated, but GitHub does not provide shell access.
Installing Rails
Choose the version of Rails you want to install:
gem install rails -v 7.0.4
If you're using rbenv, you'll need to run the following command to make the rails executable available:
rbenv rehash
Now that you've installed Rails, you can run the rails -v
command to make sure you have everything installed correctly:
rails -v
# Rails 7.0.4
If you get a different result for some reason, it means your environment may not be setup properly.
Setting Up A Database
Rails ships with sqlite3 as the default database. Chances are you won't want to use it because it's stored as a simple file on disk. You'll probably want something more robust like MySQL or PostgreSQL.
There is a lot of documentation on both, so you can just pick one that seems like you'll be more comfortable with.
If you're new to Ruby on Rails or databases in general, I strongly recommend setting up PostgreSQL.
If you're coming from PHP, you may already be familiar with MySQL.
Setting Up MySQL
Rails ships with sqlite3 as the default database. Chances are you won't want to use it because it's stored as a simple file on disk. You'll probably want something more robust like MySQL or PostgreSQL.
There is a lot of documentation on both, so you can just pick one that seems like you'll be more comfortable with.
If you're new to Ruby on Rails or databases in general, I strongly recommend setting up PostgreSQL.
If you're coming from PHP, you may already be familiar with MySQL.
You can install MySQL server and client from the packages in the Ubuntu repository. As part of the installation process, you'll set the password for the root user. This information will go into your Rails app's database.yml
file in the future.
sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client libmysqlclient-dev
Installing the libmysqlclient-dev
gives you the necessary files to compile the mysql2
gem which is what Rails will use to connect to MySQL when you setup your Rails app.
When you're finished, you can skip to the Final Steps.
Setting Up PostgreSQL
For PostgreSQL, we're going to add a new repository to easily install a recent version of Postgres.
sudo apt install postgresql-11 libpq-dev
The postgres installation doesn't setup a user for you, so you'll need to follow these steps to create a user with permission to create databases. Feel free to replace chris
with your username.
sudo -u postgres createuser chris -s
# If you would like to set a password for the user, you can do the following
sudo -u postgres psql
postgres=# \password chris
Final Steps
And now for the moment of truth. Let's create your first Rails application:
#### If you want to use SQLite (not recommended)
rails new myapp
#### If you want to use MySQL
rails new myapp -d mysql
#### If you want to use Postgres
# Note that this will expect a postgres user with the same username
# as your app, you may need to edit config/database.yml to match the
# user you created earlier
rails new myapp -d postgresql
# Move into the application directory
cd myapp
# If you setup MySQL or Postgres with a username/password, modify the
# config/database.yml file to contain the username/password that you specified
# Create the database
rake db:create
rails server
You can now visit http://localhost:3000 to view your new website!
Now that you've got your machine setup, it's time to start building some Rails applications.
If you received an error that said Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: NO)
then you need to update your config/database.yml file to match the database username and password.
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