Setting up Ruby on Rails, MySQL, Mongrel, memcached, and RMagick using MacPorts on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

I recently got the new Santa Rosa Macbook with Leopard pre-installed and I need to set up the Rails development environment.

Basically there are 3 ways to achieve that:

1. Locomotive

Locomotive method is simple and self contained. It works very well for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. However, the author acknowledges that Locomotive may not be Leopard ready.

2. Rails comes with Leopard

That’s right. Apple has included Rails by default, as noted by DHH. This sounds great. However, that means you will also have to manually install Imagick, RMagick, and all those other stuff that you need for development. Also, it may be harder to upgrade Ruby or Rails when new versions come out. You probably need to install from source to upgrade or what not…

3. MacPorts

You might already have your Rails environment set up using MacPorts. If that’s the case, why not just use that? Even if you are like me with a fresh installed Leopard, MacPorts still has its advantages. For example, you can use MacPorts to upgrade ruby in the future.

I used MacPorts to set up my Rails environment based on these other great articles:

• Teabass
• Robby on Rails
• Michael Biven
• Tobias Ebnöther

1. Install the latest Xcode version for Leopard. Download from the Apple website.

2. Install the latest MacPorts version for Leopard. Download from the MacPorts website.

Run this to update MacPorts:

sudo port selfupdate

3. Install Ruby, RubyGems, and Rails.

sudo port install ruby
sudo port install rb-rubygems
sudo gem update --system
sudo gem install rails -y

4. Install MySQL (directly from Andrew Nesbitt, shown here for completeness).

sudo port install mysql5 +server
sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.mysql5.plist
sudo -u mysql mysql_install_db5
cd /opt/local ; sudo /opt/local/lib/mysql5/bin/mysqld_safe &
sudo ln -s /opt/local/var/run/mysql5/mysqld.sock /tmp/mysql.sock

5. Install mongrel and mongrel_cluster.

sudo gem install mongrel
sudo gem install mongrel_cluster

6. Install memcached.

sudo port install memcached
sudo gem install memcache-client

Create a file called /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.danga.memcached.plist, and insert the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
        <key>Label</key>
        <string>com.danga.memcached</string>
        <key>OnDemand</key>
        <false/>
        <key>ProgramArguments</key>
        <array>
                <string>/opt/local/bin/memcached</string>
                <string>-d</string>
                <string>-m</string>
                <string>64</string>
                <string>-u</string>
                <string>www</string>
                <string>-p</string>
                <string>11211</string>
        </array>
        <key>RunAtLoad</key>
        <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

In order to launch memcached on boot, enter this in the terminal:

sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.danga.memcached.plist

7. Install ImageMagick and RMagick

sudo port install ImageMagick
sudo gem install rmagick

NEW! There are now instructions on how to install ImageMagick and RMagick.

8. Optional – I found out if you have the loaded_plugins gem installed, you may see the following error when running script/console:

/opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-1.4.2/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:477:in `const_missing':NameError: uninitialized constant Gem::Version::NUM_RE

The reason is MacPorts create two directories to store the RubyGems stuff in /opt/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby and /opt/local/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby. Ruby’s $LOAD_PATH looks in site_ruby first but the version.rb in site_ruby does not define Gem::Version::NUM_RE whereas the version.rb in vendor_ruby does. I’ve outlined the issue here. So I simply swap them:

sudo mv /opt/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby /opt/local/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby_tmp
sudo mv /opt/local/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby /opt/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby
sudo mv /opt/local/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby_tmp /opt/local/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby

This fixes the error and everything runs well for me, but I would like to hear the experts out there about why there are separate vendor_ruby and site_ruby.

That’s it. Hope you find this helpful and please report any problems.