Installing Rails 3 on Ubuntu 10.10

Installing Ruby on Rails using Ubuntu’s native package manager certainly has its advantages — namely keeping the packages up to date for you — but currently, this will get you older versions of Ruby and Rails.  Ruby 1.8.7 and Rails 2.3.5 are fine, but Rails 3 has many improvements and new Ruby developers should probably start with this version.

Get the latest version of Ruby here:

http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/

tar zxvf ruby-<version>.tar.gz
cd ruby-<version>
./configure
sudo make && make install

To avoid a “no such file to load: zlib” error later, get ruby-zlib here:

http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/ruby-zlib

tar zxvf ruby-zlib-<version>.tar.gz
cd ruby-zlib-<version>/
sudo ruby extconf.rb
sudo make && make install

Download and install RubyGems here:

http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=126

tar zxvf rubygems-<version>.tgz
cd rubygems-<version>/
sudo ruby setup.rb

Then install Rails 3 with RubyGems:

sudo gem install rails

Use apt-get to install ‘sqlite3′ and ‘libsqlite3-ruby-<most-recent-version>’, and then:

bundle install

… will install ‘sqlite3-ruby’ for you.

That’s it!  Decide on a directory where you want to do your development and then:

rails new testsite

Jump into your new ‘testsite’ directory and try to start the server:

rails server