Yeah, those steps are pretty crazy. They also aren't official, and most of the work is in setting up RVM, which you don't actually need to use for Rails. Just a

Yeah, those steps are pretty crazy. They also aren't official, and most of the work is in setting up RVM, which you don't actually need to use for Rails. Just about any non-ancient environment that has Ruby provides 1.8.7, which is the minimum you actually need to use Rails. If you want the real guide, look here: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html It's still pretty long, but most of that is introducing important Rails concepts and walking through a hello world. There seems to be a tendency in the Rails community to go nuts with packages and blindly follow quickstarts. I've never appreciated it, but it seems like the Rails developers have been rather careful to avoid falling into that trap.