I’ve been writing PHP apps for about 5 years, but it’s time to learn Ruby and its popular framework, Rails. Since there is already great documentation available, I’ll only cover the trouble spots that I’ve encountered.<\/p>\n
I began with Ruby itself and followed this quick introduction<\/a> to Ruby’s data types, object orientation,\u00a0and iteration methods. It’s a lot to swallow if you’ve spent most of your time writing in C-style languages, but I can understand the appeal of the syntax. If you’re just starting out it’s probably a good idea to spend more time with Ruby proper. Later it can be easy to conflate Ruby with Rails if both are foreign.<\/p>\n To get up and running with Rails on Arch Linux I followed the guide<\/a> on the official Arch wiki. I ran into a little trouble at the database section. The sqlite package is called sqlite3-ruby package has been renamed to sqlite-3. A proper install requires a I opted to use the Passenger Apache module rather than WEBrick because I plan to host production applications on this server eventually and it makes sense for Apache to serve everything. If you just want to play around with Rails, it’s probably a better idea to go ahead with WEBrick because Apache requires a little configuration.<\/p>\n Pacman will spit out some configuration information for Passenger and it’s important to get it right. Rails’ official Getting Started<\/a> guide is specific to WEBrick so it doesn’t tell you that the Document Root line in your httpd.conf should point to the public folder of your rails application. I wasted some time staring at an Apache index trying to figure out why the app wouldn’t execute. Just do something like this:<\/p>\n Don’t forget these lines either:<\/p>\n That last line is vital to get the blog example from the Getting Started guide working smoothly. Passenger runs your app in production mode by default, but that won’t work because the migrate command in the guide creates tables in the development table.<\/p>\n The blog app in the guide has a decent introduction to Ruby’s take on MVC and how to wire up the various components. Stay tuned for some real apps.<\/p>\n
\n# pacman -S sqlite3 <\/code>
\nand then a
\n# \u00a0gem install sqlite3 <\/code><\/p>\n<VirtualHost *:80>\r\nServerName rails.trillworks.com\r\nDocumentRoot \/path\/rails\/application\/public\r\nRailsBaseURI \/path\/rails\r\n<Directory \/path\/rails\/application\/public>\r\nAllowOverride all\r\nOptions -MultiViews\r\n<\/Directory>\r\n<\/VirtualHost><\/pre>\n
LoadModule passenger_module \/usr\/lib\/ruby\/gems\/1.9.1\/gems\/passenger-3.0.7\/ext\/apache2\/mod_passenger.soPassengerRoot \/usr\/lib\/ruby\/gems\/1.9.1\/gems\/passenger-3.0.7PassengerRuby \/usr\/bin\/ruby\r\nRailsEnv development<\/pre>\n