Filed under: Software, Freeware, Internet, Open Source, Developer
Locomotive: Ruby on Rails on Mac
With his post nominating apps for the upcoming Apple Design Awards (which we mentioned here), Scott Stevenson brought my attention to Locomotive from Ryan Rauum. Locomotive is an environment for developing Ruby on Rails applications on your Mac. It allows you to "try Ruby on Rails without worrying about breaking your current system - it's entirely self-contained." You just download it and "jump right into Rails development the minute you finish downloading." This seems a lot like MAMP, but for Ruby on Rails. So if you've ever wanted to try out Ruby on Rails (which is apparently how all the cool people are developing for Web 2.0) without the annoyances of getting Ruby and Rails properly set up, this is a perfect opportunity.Locomotive is a free download from SourceForge, but donations are requested.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Douglas F Shearer said 12:24PM on 3-15-2007
Rails and Ruby Gems are included in the Leopard, so apart from a database (MySQL and SQLite are easy enough to install) you'll be good to go. Nice to see someone offering something in the meantime.
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billy said 1:36PM on 3-15-2007
I got RoR installed the Manual way, although it's not that hard, this is definitely a very useful app even after Leopard is released -- one can run it on older Macs, and it may have more up to date version than the ones in Leopard too.
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Chris said 2:24PM on 3-15-2007
This is the best way to hit the ground running.
The developer put a good bit of thought into how it's partitioned (via bundles). If you want to test how a particular change is going to affect you, you just duplicate the bundle and run the update/change within that bundle.
Most people write Locomotive off because they don't know that it's very easy to update Ruby, Rails, plugins, etc.
I've gone down the standard stack install path once but for me it's Locomotive all the way.
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hangon said 2:36PM on 3-15-2007
rails is really over hyped !!!
a framework like django is less known but more powerful.
my 2 cents opinion
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Todd said 4:12PM on 3-15-2007
I personally think Locomotive is great, and it makes it really easy to get started with Ruby and Ruby on Rails. If you are interested in either, I'd recommend you check it out.
Ruby comes with OS X, but it's an older version. If you want to install the newest version, and you don't want to use something like Locomotive, then you have to do it manually.
It isn't that hard to install. I was helping someone a while back, and I decided to make a screencast that shows all the steps. It's not only useful for installing Ruby, but for installing any command line application. I would have liked such a screencast when I first setup everything, so I hope it helps some people.
http://www.infinitered.com/blog/?p=6
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