A Mac OS X Snow Leopard upgrade can go badly for Rails developers.

Norbauer provides some advise on fixing mySQL and other elements of the Ruby on Rails development environment that can break when upgrading to the  64-bit Snow Leopard environment. For a full description, see http://norbauer.com/notebooks/code/notes/snow-leopard-upgrading-for-rails-developers.

We have a large number of iMac OS X system on which we develop Ruby applications and were thankful this upgrade advise. Unfortunately, it did not alway address our problems. In those case, we actually found a fresh install was the most effective solution. Developers in the same situation may find the following directions for doing this helpful.

Duc and I tried to upgrade to Snow Leopard and to our surprise, it did not go very well. As a last resort, we had to make a fresh install of the OS. One shouldn't have to do this, but in case somebody needs to, here are the steps that I noted down:

 

--- Restart the machine with the the OS DVD, before you start the installation, click on Tools-> Disk Utility, Erase the hard drive. (If you don't do this step, you have have an upgrade system) Then go back to the installation process.

 

Here are some quick notes to set up development environment:

 

--- Install Xcode package from the DVD

--- Install 64 BIT Mac version of mysql package from mysql.com

--- Set sticky bit for /private/tmp/ (Prevent normal user to detele the /tmp/ folder which contains the mysql.sock)

chmod +t /tmp

--- Add path to mysql folder:

Put this into ~/.bash_profile

PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/mysql/bin

--- Check mysql socket location:

mysql_config --socket

--- Fix mysql.sock for PHP:

sudo mkdir /var/mysql

sudo ln -s /tmp/mysql.sock /var/mysql/mysql.sock

Test mysql.sock:

mysqladmin --socket=/path_to_socket_file/ version

--- Installing Ruby:

Xcode come with some basic gems and you cannot remove these gems. Of course you can upgrade to newest versions.

sudo gem update --system 

sudo gem install rails 

sudo gem update rake 

sudo gem update sqlite3-ruby

Because SL is a 64 bit, you have to install mysql gem for 64 bit architecture

sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

This should get you ready for PHP / RoR / Mysql dev.

 

Cheers,

 

 

Tri

 

 

 

 

I'm thinking of building a Ruby on Rails based micro-multinational accounting system. It's the last thing I want to do, but it seems like nothing else free or paid out there is adequate.

Can you tell if a site was implemented using Ruby on Rails? It is not always obvious. But there are clues that you can use. One of the East Agile developers shares the following advise on this topic.

Based on my experience about rails and web technologies, I have some rules to identify the technology behind a website:
- recognize by URL pattern
- view HTML source
- HTTP monitor by Firebug
- recognize it's not rails-based by understanding other platforms

Basically, I give you 2 simple approaches. To take advantage of these, you may need an understanding of some web technologies and you may need to install more tools. 

1. URL pattern:
   - rails-based website usually does not have those file extensions in URL: php, asp, aspx, do, jsp, ...
   - Rails supports RESTful URL build-in. So URL in rails usually in patterns:
      //new         --> new item page
      //        --> detail page of an item
      ///edit   --> edit an item with id
      /             --> list all items
      ///collection>
     ...
      may be *products*, *users*, *projects*
     Ex:
        /projects/1234/stories    --> all stories in project with id 1234
      /products/new             --> new production page
      ...
2. HTML code: 
    - open a page that has a form (eg: new products page, guestbook page, user registration page ...)
    - view HTML source: (menu View->Page Source in Firefox)
    - find HTML tag