Installing Rails on the Chromebook
Last week I wrote a little bit about my goal of configuring React to work with my chromebook. Although it runs very slowly, it does run, and all told it was easier to set up than I anticipated. This week however, I decided that I wanted to take the React application that I had been working on, and turn it into a full stack application. In order for me to do that, there certainly options, but in the name of sticking to what I know, I decided that the back end should be created with Rails — which it turns out I definitely don’t remember as well as I might have hoped!
The first thing that I needed to take care of was installing Ruby on the machine. I didn’t really know too much about what I was doing, but I followed the instructions at https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/installation/ for a Debian distribution of Linux. I felt like the next step would be to install the Rails gem. However, when I attempted the command: “gem install rails” it was unsuccessful. After some careful consideration and reading, I found other users who had similar issues. It seems that it is certainly possible to install Rails in this way, but it involves some serious messing around with configuration files — something that I am not really up for. So now what? I continued reading, and found a suggestion to utilize a version manager. Apparently, doing so would allow me to bypass the manual configuration of some hard-to-find files, and from what I could tell there are two good options — rbenv, and RVM (short for Ruby version manager).
I started off by uninstalling the Ruby version that I had originally installed, and then by trying rbenv — I followed all the steps (to the best of my knowledge), but when it came time to actually install the latest version of Ruby, the command would just cause my terminal to freeze up, and eventually it would terminate the command. I’m not sure if this was because of something that I did, or perhaps some issue with the program, but I felt like I was spending too much time on this, and decided to uninstall the rbenv program, and try to get things going with RVM. Thanfully, this turned out to be the solution. Using the rvm command line interface, I was able to install the newest version of Ruby, as well as the Rails gem.
At this point I was able to create a new Rails project, but I’m sure that there will still be more configuration to take care of. For example, I can tell already that I’m going to have some trouble with getting Postgres connected to the app — but I think that will have to be a problem for future me.
https://forum.theodinproject.com/t/gem-install-rails-solved/15587
