TCSH and Ruby on Rails for Macintosh

Some comments on Hivelogic - The Narrative - Building Ruby, Rails, Subversion, Mongrel, and MySQL on Mac OS X

I’ve been using this set of instructions to install ruby on rails on MacOSX for a while (in case you’ve ever wondered, which you haven’t, I use a MacBook Pro set up to run Windows XP and MacOSX 1.4.x.) It doesn’t work well for me, because I use ‘tcsh’ and not ‘bash’ as my shell on the computer. I also like confining changes to my own account.

So, I use the instructions given in the cited article, with the following difference.

Paths
Here, add the following line to the end of your .cshrc

setenv PATH /usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/mysql/bin:/sw/bin:$PATH

(This is all just one long line)

For the rest, I replace all instances of ’sudo command’ with ’sudo tcsh’ followed by the command. More concretely, instead of:

curl -O ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz
tar xzvf ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.8.6
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --enable-pthread --with-readline-dir=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
sudo make install-doc
cd ..

I do:

curl -O ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz
tar xzvf ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.8.6
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --enable-pthread --with-readline-dir=/usr/local
make
sudo tcsh
make install
make install-doc
exit
cd ..

This has the advantage of keeping my root environment clean and running bash, which have been disadvantages to the other solutions I’ve seen for this sort of thing. There’s a related issue of whether you should be able to sudo a shell, but that’s not the point of this article to argue about — this article is about making sure you have the right environment variables when you type ‘make install,’ basically.

I haven’t provided exact conversions of all the sets of commands because if you can’t figure the rest out, you might want to switch your account shell back to bash to avoid more trouble later. In particular, you will want to execute the ‘rehash’ shell command on occasion.

[beansidhe:~/ruby-1.8.6] zeitgeis% ruby -v
ruby 1.8.2 (2004-12-25) [universal-darwin8.0]
[beansidhe:~/ruby-1.8.6] zeitgeis% rehash
[beansidhe:~/ruby-1.8.6] zeitgeis% ruby -v
ruby 1.8.6 (2007-03-13 patchlevel 0) [i686-darwin8.9.1]

‘rehash’ causes the shell to recreate the cached path, which is handy when you’re adding new executables outside the current directory.

Technorati Tags: rubyonrails, ruby, macosx, development