Ruby on Rails, a web application framework that helps you build great applications and websites, can easily be installed and set up on Ubuntu systems using the steps below.
Many beautiful applications and websites are built on the Ruby programming language. And setting up your environment is the first step.
This brief tutorial shows students and new users how to set up a Ruby on Rails environment on Ubuntu 16.04 | 18.04 and 18.10.
There are many tutorials online that will help you set up your environment. However, this post will make it easy for students and new users just learning to create their own Ruby on Rails environments.
These are the packages we’re going to set up.
- Ruby version 2.5.3
- Rails version 5.2.1
- MariaDB
Installing Ruby
You’ll need to install some dependencies to install Ruby and Rails on Ubuntu. To make that happen, install Node.js and Yarn repositories. This will make installing the dependencies easier.
First, install these curl and git packages.
sudo apt update sudo apt install curl git
Then run the commands below to add Node.js and Yarn repositories and keys to your system. Then install some core packages to get your environment going.
curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_8.x | sudo -E bash - curl -sS https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/pubkey.gpg | sudo apt-key add - echo "deb https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/ stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/yarn.list sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install nodejs yarn zlib1g-dev build-essential libssl-dev libreadline-dev libyaml-dev libsqlite3-dev sqlite3 libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev software-properties-common libffi-dev
When you’re done, Continue below:
After adding the repositories and installing the necessary packages above, install Ruby with your local profile settings using rbenv. You’ll then use rbenv to install ruby-build.
cd ~/ git clone https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc echo 'eval "$(rbenv init -)"' >> ~/.bashrc exec $SHELL git clone https://github.com/rbenv/ruby-build.git ~/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc exec $SHELL
After setting up your local profile, run the commands below to install Ruby version 2.5.3. If a newer version is available, replace the version number with that.
Visit this site to find out Ruby’s latest versions.
rbenv install 2.5.3 rbenv global 2.5.3
To verify that Ruby is installed, run the commands below:
ruby -v
You should see similar lines below:
ruby 2.5.3p105 (2018-10-18 revision 65156) [x86_64-linux]
Another package management you’ll want to install is bundler. to do that, run the commands below
gem install bundler
Now run the command below after installing the bundler.
rbenv rehash
Install Rails
Now that the Ruby environment is set up, run the commands below to install Rails. Rails can be installed from Node.Js. First, run the commands below to install the Node.js repository, then install the Node.js package.
curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_8.x | sudo -E bash - sudo apt-get install -y nodejs
Now that Node.js is installed, run the commands below to install Rails.
gem install rails -v 5.2.1
Don’t forget to rehash your rbenv environment installing install new packages.
rbenv rehash
To verify if Rails is installed, run the commands below.
rails -v
You should see something similar to the lines below:
Rails 5.2.1
Install MariaDB
Usually, a database server is used for most applications. And MariaDB is an excellent open-source database server. To install it on Ubuntu, run the commands below:
sudo apt-get install mariadb-server mariadb-client libmariadbclient-dev
After installing MariaDB, the commands below can stop, start and enable the MariaDB service to start up when the server boots.
Run these on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
sudo systemctl stop mysql.service sudo systemctl start mysql.service sudo systemctl enable mysql.service
Run these on Ubuntu 18.10 and 18.04 LTS
sudo systemctl stop mariadb.service sudo systemctl start mariadb.service sudo systemctl enable mariadb.service
Next, run the commands below to secure the database server with a root password if you were not prompted to do so during the installation.
sudo mysql_secure_installation
When prompted, answer the questions below by following the guide.
- Enter current password for root (enter for none): Just press the Enter
- Set root password? [Y/n]: Y
- New password: Enter password
- Re-enter new password: Repeat password
- Remove anonymous users? [Y/n]: Y
- Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n]: Y
- Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n]: Y
- Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n]: Y
Once MariaDB is installed, run the commands below to test whether the database server was installed.
sudo mysql -u root -p
Type the root password when prompted.
The server was successfully installed if you see a similar screen.
After that, Ruby and Rails should be installed, and your environment should be ready for you to start building apps based on Ruby and Rails.
Conclusion:
This post showed you how to install Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu Linux.
