Setting up Ubuntu 15.04 on the new Dell XPS 13 for Rails development Published July 05, 2016

A shiny new dev machine deserves an equally shiny new Ruby on Rails setup, so let's set one up.

Pre-requirements and tools

Odds and ends

These are a handful of tools and dependencies that we'll need for development.

$ sudo apt-get install curl libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libreadline-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev python-software-properties

Git

Version control is your friend. Use it.

$ sudo apt-get install git  # install git
$ git config --global user.name "Your Name Here"  # set git global config
$ git config --global user.email "Your Email Here"  # set git global config

Node.js

$ sudo apt-get install nodejs build-essential npm  # install node.js, npm (node's package manager), and some other extras to help out later

RVM

The Ruby Version Manager (rvm) will be used to manage your installed ruby and gemset versions

$ gpg --keyserver hkp://keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 409B6B1796C275462A1703113804BB82D39DC0E3
$ curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable  # install stable version of rvm
$ source ~/.rvm/scripts/rvm  # load rvm into current terminal window

Install Ruby

$ rvm install 2.2.1  # install ruby (this will take awhile)
# Note that 2.2.1 is the latest ruby version at the time of writing this.  You can check for the latest ruby version with `rvm list known`
$ rvm use 2.2.1 --default  # set ruby 2.2.1 as default ruby to use
$ ruby -v  # this should return something like "ruby-2.2.1p85 (2015-02-26 revision 49769) [x86_64-linux]"

Install Rails

First, let's install the bundler gem.

$ gem install bundler

Now install rails.

$ gem install rails -v 4.2.0

You're done! (kind of)

You should be pretty much ready to start rails development, but you will probably want to install other things like Postgresql, Guard, and Redis. GoRails has actually set up a fantastic guide to setting up your development environment, so I recommend you head over there and check out their Setup Guide

There are almost certainly dependencies I've left out here, so if you get any errors while installing gems, be sure to read the error messages.

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