d13design

I’ve been quite excited by Ruby on Rails for a while now but I’ve never actually had enough time to sit down and figure things out. Well, recently I plucked up the courage and delved in.

There’s tons of tutorials out there helping you get set up and coding with Rails but I found many of the a little hard to follow and, being a designer more than a programmer, I found myself going round in circles with a lot of trial and error. I finally got myself sorted and I thought it might be useful for other people in my boat if I blogged about just what I did.

This post will tell you how I got my Windows based development environment sorted and subsequent blogs will talk you through some of the first little projects I undertook.

Installing Ruby

The first step I took was to actually get the base language (Ruby) installed–I did this using an all-in-one installer called InstantRails (http://instantrails.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl). This was a quick way to get most of the bits I needed set up but, in my trial and error I found some other cool tools. So, after unzipping InstantRails to my hard drive I fired it up and told it “not to run automatically when Windows launches”.

Setting up a database

The next step for my set up was to sort out a database server. I decided on MySQL for a couple of reasons:

1. I was already familiar with it as I’ve been using MySQL for a few years now
2. It’s the main database format support by my web host

The MySQL (http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.0.html) set up was quick and easy and I also installed the GUI tools (http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/gui-tools/5.0.html) as well, just in case.

Establishing a development environment

My first dabblings with Ruby on Rails made use of InstantRails and the command prompt but I soon found this confusing, especially as all I really wanted to do was get to grips with the language. It was this that led me to discover Aptana Studio (http://www.aptana.com/studio). This is a great, free development environment built on the Eclipse Java Framework. The great thing about Aptana is it has a neat Rails plugin called RadRails (http://www.aptana.com/rails/).

So, first I installed Aptana Studio and when that was complete I fired it up. Luckily the Aptana start page within the application had a handy link to install RadRails so I clicked it and let the update run.

Now, at some point either during the RadRails installation or when I created my first project I was told that I didn’t have Ruby installed and that a bundled JRuby would be used. As part of the warning I was given the chance to locate an existing Ruby installation, I did and navigated to the ruby folder as part of InstantRails. Once located, I set this to my default Ruby interpreter.

Creating your first Rails project

Once everything’s installed and you’ve re-booted your machine you can head into Aptana Studio and create your first Rails project. To do this, select File > New > Project and locate “Rails Project” in the options. When asked, provide the following details:

• Project name — whatever you want your project to be called, “blog” for instance
• Location — I just stuck with the default
• Generate skeleton — you want this ticked, it’ll save a bunch of work
• Database — set this to MySQL (if that’s the one you’re using)
• Rails version — leave this set to “latest”
• Server — I tend to use WEBrick rather than Mongrel and I tick to have the server start automatically

After you’ve added all that, click “finish” and your Rails application should build and start!

The Aptana RadRails "success" screen

If you’ve been successful you should see a page similar to that above displayed within the Aptana internal browser. Congratulations, you’re rolling on Rails!