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Show HN: Rails One Click Installer for Mac Os X

92 points by oscardelben 15y ago

oscardelben 15y ago
Author here. I hope this can help the community, especially Yehuda with his own one click installer project.
- telemachos 15y ago
  Have you seen Jeremy McAnally's Railcar[1]? It might be worth a look since there seems to be some overlap in goals (even if maybe not in how you get there). Edit: Here's a link to JM's blog post explaining his choices for Railcar[2]. [1]: https://github.com/arcturo/Railcar https://github.com/arcturo/Railcar [2]: [1]: http://omgbloglol.com/post/20783445544/on-railcar-an-isolated-rails-environment http://omgbloglol.com/post/20783445544/on-railcar-an-isolate...
  - oscardelben 15y ago
    I hadn't. What I want to make though is a sandboxed environment that doesn't use rvm, etc and that provides everything you need. I also want to make an interface for beginners to easily run the server, execute commands, etc.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - jeremymcanally 15y ago
      That's pretty much what I've built. I just use RbEnv to setup the environment for each version of Ruby installed. Running the server, etc. is already built.
      - oscardelben 15y ago
        I looked at your project and it looks very nice indeed. Nice work.
traxtech 15y ago
For Rails, "sudo gem update --system; sudo gem install rails" is not sufficient ?
- oscardelben 15y ago
  This is targeted at beginners with little/no programming experience.
  - tjoozeylabs 15y ago
    cool
- adrianpike 15y ago
  It's not. At the very least, you'll want to upgrade to a 1.9 version of Ruby - even in 10.7, I'm pretty sure it still comes out of the box with 1.8.7. Also, most of the Ruby or Rails developers I know use either rvm or rbenv to have multiple versions of Ruby installed side by side.
  - traxtech 15y ago
    I run Rails 3.2.3 with Ruby 1.8.7 on Snow Leopard without problems :)
    - cmelbye 15y ago
      Right, and that's the last release series that will support 1.8.7. Thus, you'll want Ruby 1.9 eventually. Besides Rails compatibility, 1.9 is faster, includes lots of nice new syntaxes and methods for doing things, better encoding support, etc.
      - Argorak 15y ago
        Also, 1.8.7 EOL is so close that you should not choose it for new projects.
CWIZO 15y ago
Hmm there was this a couple of weeks ago: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1397300529/railsapp?ref=live http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1397300529/railsapp?ref=... I guess you don't need $44,219 to make "rails simple again".
- ivanbernat 15y ago
  Came here to say the same thing!
- 1123581321 15y ago
  I think you need the money to get past "This software is not ready! I'm still working out some major problems."
  - oscardelben 15y ago
    No I'll need time for that. This is just 4 hours of work. I posted it now because I'll need help from the community as it evolves (especially testing)
- tptacek 15y ago
  What a stupid comment. $44,000 is ~2/5ths of a Sr. Rails Dev's salary. If Engine Yard, Github, Joyent or Force/Heroku announced that they were going to furlough one of their senior devs to work for 5 months on the best possible OS X Rails installer, we'd be cheering them on. But Yehuda Katz has the temerity to suggest that working directly for his end-users might be a good way to accomplish the same goal, and for that, earns snarky bullshit like this.
  - CWIZO 15y ago
    I was just pointing out that there is someone who wanted $25k upfront and here we have someone who will do the work for free. That's all, just context. And since you mentioned it, $44k is a two full years salary where I live, so excuse me if I think that's a bit much for a installer script. Other than that, I have no interest in this since I'm not a RoR developer nor am I planning on becoming one. Like I said, I just wanted to provide context.
rickdale 15y ago
Love it. Ideas like this make the first step that much more welcoming.
nachteilig 15y ago
This looks like a nice idea, but I'm echoing others in wondering why this is necessary. Tools like RVM make it fairly trivial to maintain distinct versions of rails, associated gems etc. The author might make this more compelling by sandboxing things like nginx, unicorn, etc. (in the path that MAMP and such have taken) that are a bit more of a pain to manage independently on OS X.
- jeebus 15y ago
  I agree. This seems at this time to focus on the already easy to install/configure parts (a Ruby build and Rails gem) and not the harder items (like Nginx).
sil3ntmac 15y ago
I prefer to use rvm :) curl -L get.rvm.io | bash -s stable source ~/.bash_profile rvm install 1.9.3 gem install rails
- wolframarnold 15y ago
  Yeah, I would agree strongly. The folks who'll use this are beginners and nothing sucks more than having some weird one-off environment that nobody else uses. I teach a lot of Ruby classes and I always tell people to do things in the most common way. That way, if they need help, the people helping them will feel right at home, and anything the beginners might google themselves will also apply. This is not the case if your one click installer doesn't follow the most common paths. It's convention over configuration, remember? Lastly, what I've been missing in the one click installer discussion is maintainability and upgradability. This is exactly the problem that brought about tools like bundler, rvm, homebrew or Debian/Ubuntu packaging.
  - egypturnash 15y ago
    Sssooooo yeah. Let me speak for the beginners such as myself. A week or two before Yehuda announced his KS, I decided I wanted to fuck around with ROR. I blew like a half a day wrestling with Locomotive. Then I followed... some reciepe, I couldn't tell you where I found it. By the time I got that working I had blown the whole day. And I had no energy to actually try, you know. Fucking with ROR. I still haven't. And ever since I did this, I've been having problems with something filling up the limited space on my Air. When I reboot it goes back to normal, but within a week I've got my computer bitching about being out of space. Is it something my installation of ROR and it's support infrastructure is doing? Hell, I don't know. And since I honestly have no idea what exactly I installed where, it's pretty much impossible for me to uninstall ROR and it's infrastructure to find out if it's the cause. If I'd been using a self-contained package like MAMP (or like what Locomotive used to be) then I'd be able to nuke it at the drop of a hat instead of spending a day or two trying to piece together what I did, try to remove a ton of command-line packages, and hope I don't accidentally kill off something my machine actually depends on for basic operation. I think it is very very important for beginners to be able to say "gee I didn't get into this and I need space" and quickly remove it. Your method of using "the most common way" is very hostile to this.
holgersindbaek 15y ago
This is great. Have just been installing rails on 3 friends macs, cuz' I'm working on a project with them - Meer.li - and it is such a terrible experience each time. Looking forward to what this can become.
fieldforceapp 15y ago
How would this compare to say the BitNami RubyStack, I've been using this to keep multiple Rails version (2.x and 3.x) running on Lion: http://bitnami.org http://bitnami.org
jacktang 15y ago
rvm or JewelryBox should be fine to me under Mac OS x
raghavb 15y ago
This should hopefully help in eradicating "Chapter One: Installing Rails" from most Ruby on Rails books. Perhaps one of the the most frustrating chapters that someone beginning to learn Rail's faces.
- graywh 15y ago
  Because everyone develops Rails in OS X? I hate that assumption.

92 points by oscardelben 15y ago

oscardelben 15y ago

Author here. I hope this can help the community, especially Yehuda with his own one click installer project.

telemachos 15y ago
Have you seen Jeremy McAnally's Railcar[1]? It might be worth a look since there seems to be some overlap in goals (even if maybe not in how you get there). Edit: Here's a link to JM's blog post explaining his choices for Railcar[2]. [1]: https://github.com/arcturo/Railcar https://github.com/arcturo/Railcar [2]: [1]: http://omgbloglol.com/post/20783445544/on-railcar-an-isolated-rails-environment http://omgbloglol.com/post/20783445544/on-railcar-an-isolate...
- oscardelben 15y ago
  I hadn't. What I want to make though is a sandboxed environment that doesn't use rvm, etc and that provides everything you need. I also want to make an interface for beginners to easily run the server, execute commands, etc.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - jeremymcanally 15y ago
    That's pretty much what I've built. I just use RbEnv to setup the environment for each version of Ruby installed. Running the server, etc. is already built.
    - oscardelben 15y ago
      I looked at your project and it looks very nice indeed. Nice work.

traxtech 15y ago

For Rails, "sudo gem update --system; sudo gem install rails" is not sufficient ?

oscardelben 15y ago
This is targeted at beginners with little/no programming experience.
- tjoozeylabs 15y ago
  cool
adrianpike 15y ago
It's not. At the very least, you'll want to upgrade to a 1.9 version of Ruby - even in 10.7, I'm pretty sure it still comes out of the box with 1.8.7. Also, most of the Ruby or Rails developers I know use either rvm or rbenv to have multiple versions of Ruby installed side by side.
- traxtech 15y ago
  I run Rails 3.2.3 with Ruby 1.8.7 on Snow Leopard without problems :)
  - cmelbye 15y ago
    Right, and that's the last release series that will support 1.8.7. Thus, you'll want Ruby 1.9 eventually. Besides Rails compatibility, 1.9 is faster, includes lots of nice new syntaxes and methods for doing things, better encoding support, etc.
    - Argorak 15y ago
      Also, 1.8.7 EOL is so close that you should not choose it for new projects.

CWIZO 15y ago

Hmm there was this a couple of weeks ago: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1397300529/railsapp?ref=live http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1397300529/railsapp?ref=... I guess you don't need $44,219 to make "rails simple again".

ivanbernat 15y ago
Came here to say the same thing!
1123581321 15y ago
I think you need the money to get past "This software is not ready! I'm still working out some major problems."
- oscardelben 15y ago
  No I'll need time for that. This is just 4 hours of work. I posted it now because I'll need help from the community as it evolves (especially testing)
tptacek 15y ago
What a stupid comment. $44,000 is ~2/5ths of a Sr. Rails Dev's salary. If Engine Yard, Github, Joyent or Force/Heroku announced that they were going to furlough one of their senior devs to work for 5 months on the best possible OS X Rails installer, we'd be cheering them on. But Yehuda Katz has the temerity to suggest that working directly for his end-users might be a good way to accomplish the same goal, and for that, earns snarky bullshit like this.
- CWIZO 15y ago
  I was just pointing out that there is someone who wanted $25k upfront and here we have someone who will do the work for free. That's all, just context. And since you mentioned it, $44k is a two full years salary where I live, so excuse me if I think that's a bit much for a installer script. Other than that, I have no interest in this since I'm not a RoR developer nor am I planning on becoming one. Like I said, I just wanted to provide context.

rickdale 15y ago

Love it. Ideas like this make the first step that much more welcoming.

nachteilig 15y ago

This looks like a nice idea, but I'm echoing others in wondering why this is necessary. Tools like RVM make it fairly trivial to maintain distinct versions of rails, associated gems etc. The author might make this more compelling by sandboxing things like nginx, unicorn, etc. (in the path that MAMP and such have taken) that are a bit more of a pain to manage independently on OS X.

jeebus 15y ago
I agree. This seems at this time to focus on the already easy to install/configure parts (a Ruby build and Rails gem) and not the harder items (like Nginx).

sil3ntmac 15y ago

I prefer to use rvm :) curl -L get.rvm.io | bash -s stable source ~/.bash_profile rvm install 1.9.3 gem install rails

wolframarnold 15y ago
Yeah, I would agree strongly. The folks who'll use this are beginners and nothing sucks more than having some weird one-off environment that nobody else uses. I teach a lot of Ruby classes and I always tell people to do things in the most common way. That way, if they need help, the people helping them will feel right at home, and anything the beginners might google themselves will also apply. This is not the case if your one click installer doesn't follow the most common paths. It's convention over configuration, remember? Lastly, what I've been missing in the one click installer discussion is maintainability and upgradability. This is exactly the problem that brought about tools like bundler, rvm, homebrew or Debian/Ubuntu packaging.
- egypturnash 15y ago
  Sssooooo yeah. Let me speak for the beginners such as myself. A week or two before Yehuda announced his KS, I decided I wanted to fuck around with ROR. I blew like a half a day wrestling with Locomotive. Then I followed... some reciepe, I couldn't tell you where I found it. By the time I got that working I had blown the whole day. And I had no energy to actually try, you know. Fucking with ROR. I still haven't. And ever since I did this, I've been having problems with something filling up the limited space on my Air. When I reboot it goes back to normal, but within a week I've got my computer bitching about being out of space. Is it something my installation of ROR and it's support infrastructure is doing? Hell, I don't know. And since I honestly have no idea what exactly I installed where, it's pretty much impossible for me to uninstall ROR and it's infrastructure to find out if it's the cause. If I'd been using a self-contained package like MAMP (or like what Locomotive used to be) then I'd be able to nuke it at the drop of a hat instead of spending a day or two trying to piece together what I did, try to remove a ton of command-line packages, and hope I don't accidentally kill off something my machine actually depends on for basic operation. I think it is very very important for beginners to be able to say "gee I didn't get into this and I need space" and quickly remove it. Your method of using "the most common way" is very hostile to this.

holgersindbaek 15y ago

This is great. Have just been installing rails on 3 friends macs, cuz' I'm working on a project with them - Meer.li - and it is such a terrible experience each time. Looking forward to what this can become.

fieldforceapp 15y ago

How would this compare to say the BitNami RubyStack, I've been using this to keep multiple Rails version (2.x and 3.x) running on Lion: http://bitnami.org http://bitnami.org

jacktang 15y ago

rvm or JewelryBox should be fine to me under Mac OS x

raghavb 15y ago

This should hopefully help in eradicating "Chapter One: Installing Rails" from most Ruby on Rails books. Perhaps one of the the most frustrating chapters that someone beginning to learn Rail's faces.

graywh 15y ago
Because everyone develops Rails in OS X? I hate that assumption.