Icheb’s blog

Just to prove I’m still alive, I’ll explain some stuff I did today.

Today, I decided I wanted to install Ruby on Rails.

So I’d copied a virtual Debian Sarge machine on the Sebsoft VPS server, so I could do it from a (somewhat too) clean start.

First it took me about 45 minutes to get the VPS to work like it should. But after that, I could finally begin installing.

My goal was to spend a maximum of 45 minutes to get everything working and after that spend 20 minutes to create a blog, like the blog screencast on the Ruby on Rails website.

Begin
How to begin, well, I’d found a nice tutorial that was nice and easy to follow, to get the VPS cleaned up a bit, and install some basic crap, to get everything going. So after following http://www.howtoforge.com/ruby_on_rails_apache2_fastcgi_debian_p3 I had a nice MySQL server, with Postfix, that could talk SSL.

Whohoo, nice, first time I worked with Postfix, and well, copypasting everything is just easier and faster .

The next step was on page 4 of the same howto. However, after installing the FastCGI lib and the mod_fastcgi for Apache 2.0, I ran into a brick wall. The server is actually i686, but gives back errors when trying to compile in a certain way, so I have to compile everything with i386 support, too lazy to repeat the installation of the VPS .

So I switched to http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/329. Granted, I didn’t install ‘apache libapache-mod-fastcgi’ like it said there, but that part already worked.

After about one hour and a few minutes, I had everything ready, and added the first vhost to Apache’s config. Did take an additional chmod 777 but after this it worked like a charm.

In 20 minutes I had a basic scaffolding based blog created in Ruby on Rails. It took somewhat longer due to the fact I was using a MySQL console and VIM to enter everything, but I’ve got to admit, RoR really is fast when trying to create something.

Converting scaffolding into actual code as an app basis rules!

Just wish I knew more about Ruby.

Alright, this is something for the next blog entry, never ever again use Micro$oft M$ MS Word to type the actual entry in, it takes more time to change the crap it outputs to something usefull than to manually code in the style you want…