June 1st 2012

TAGS:
Open Source
Ruby

RailsInstaller for OS X

If you love Ruby on Rails, Ruby and Git, then you want to share them. They empower you to be creative and productive. You need to share them. As of this week, RailsInstaller for Windows has been shared with over 250,000 friends and colleagues! Wow!

Unfortunately, if your friend or co-worker is on OS X then there hasn’t been an all-in-one RailsInstaller. Until today!

The RailsInstaller website is now multi-platform with Windows and OS X installers.

In only a few minutes, you can point a friend to the RailsInstaller website, download the installer, run it, and you will have everything you need to create Ruby on Rails apps and store them in Git repositories.

I recently had to completely refresh my MacBook Air. AARRGH. Fortunately, it was a perfect time to do some QA on RailsInstaller. I expected bugs; I expected to be creating tickets. Instead, it Just Worked. Booya! So I am personally very happy that RailsInstaller for OS/X exists. I was able to share Rails with myself!

The installer includes the osx-gcc-installer (200Mb or so) which means that users do not need to download XCode and install its command-line tools.

The entire project is open source. If you see bugs, want to improve the installer or build out a custom installer for your workplace, please go to https://github.com/railsinstaller/railsinstaller-nix for the source code. Please raise any bugs at the issue tracker.

Thanks

Thanks to Michal Papis from the RVM and SM core teams, for leading the work on RailsInstaller for OS/X.

Thanks to BitRock for giving the RailsInstaller project and its developers a license for their InstallBuilder product.

Thanks to Wayne E. Seguin for the SM framework which is used to package many additional packages and dependencies that many RubyGems require. RailsInstaller for OS/X users won’t need to use a different package manager such as Homebrew or MacPorts for most common gems.