Help with Rails? • Hacker News Board

Re: Help with Rails?

#21

Post by mst » Sun, Jul 14, 2013, 8:45 PM UTC

dreyfiz wrote: post #17

1. Get on IRC, people hang out there all day waiting to help people for free. 2. Here's a volunteer hotline to call for help: http://rails.pockethotline.com/

And then stay on IRC - and try and help other people with their problems as a displacement activity while you're letting your subconscious work on something else.

Not only will you learn things by trying to help, but you'll demonstrate value as a community member which will improve the quality of the help you receive as well.

Re: Help with Rails?

#22

Post by bratsche » Sun, Jul 14, 2013, 8:48 PM UTC

jrbeal wrote: post #12

Wow! My son was right! This site is awesome! Thanks SO much everyone! Good question wintermute. I wanted a Linux development environment but only have Windows at home. I was thinking about buying another box just for this purpose and load native Linux thinking this would be less ghetto but I don't know... Thanks for the offer benigeri! I'll hit you up later... thinkful.com sounds like a great resource. shail: There w…

There's a really long way from getting bundle to run until you need to deploy. I'd recommend not worrying about deployment until you've got your app up and running locally.

If you want to develop on Linux without buying another machine, you could (at least for now) download VirtualBox and install Linux on it. That will let you run Linux from within Windows.

Re: Help with Rails?

#23

Post by cpursley » Sun, Jul 14, 2013, 8:51 PM UTC

I highly recommend Action.io - a cloud-based linux development environment and IDE that I wish were around when I got started. I literally created a new box, cloned a rails app from github, raked the db and fired up rails server in less than three minutes.

Really, check it out if you're having difficulty getting your environment set up. Here's a link to get started https://www.nitrous.io/join/BiSdgSxLjIk (full disclosure: it's a referral link that will get me No2 credits).

And when you're ready to deploy, just use Heroku. Good luck and keep at it!

Re: Help with Rails?

#24

Post by jey » Sun, Jul 14, 2013, 8:55 PM UTC

jrbeal wrote: post #12

Wow! My son was right! This site is awesome! Thanks SO much everyone! Good question wintermute. I wanted a Linux development environment but only have Windows at home. I was thinking about buying another box just for this purpose and load native Linux thinking this would be less ghetto but I don't know... Thanks for the offer benigeri! I'll hit you up later... thinkful.com sounds like a great resource. shail: There w…

I would suggest running Linux in a virtual machine. A decent choice would be the combination of Ubuntu running under VirtualBox (a free VM). Here's a random guide I found online (I'm not vouching for its veracity): http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/virtualbox

I bet it's possible to do all this stuff under Windows natively too, but it's probably going to be harder to find help. So if you have some familiarity with UNIX-like OSes already, I'd suggest just using something like Ubuntu in a VM.

Re: Help with Rails?

#25

Post by chrismealy » Sun, Jul 14, 2013, 9:00 PM UTC

Don't worry, it's like this for everybody. Just hang in there. Suddenly it'll all come together and you'll forget what was so hard about it.

Re: Help with Rails?

#26

Post by troels » Sun, Jul 14, 2013, 9:06 PM UTC

I love Rails, but I think it might be better for you to go with a PHP framework. PHP is just dead simple to get running and deploy. I would suggest something like Yii or Codeigniter, both of which are somewhat similar to Rails in their architecture.

Re: Help with Rails?

#27

Post by xentronium » Sun, Jul 14, 2013, 9:09 PM UTC

jrbeal wrote: post #12

Wow! My son was right! This site is awesome! Thanks SO much everyone! Good question wintermute. I wanted a Linux development environment but only have Windows at home. I was thinking about buying another box just for this purpose and load native Linux thinking this would be less ghetto but I don't know... Thanks for the offer benigeri! I'll hit you up later... thinkful.com sounds like a great resource. shail: There w…

Unfortunately, developing for rails in windows today is a bag of hurt, so you'll probably need to learn some basic linux skills. I'd suggest, if your time and hardware allows, to spend some time in a virtual machine using one of the more popular linux distributions to get a hold of what's going on. Besides, there is a LOT of guides and tutorials of how to set up the development environment for ubuntu or debian.

Anyways, keep going, pain is temporary :)

Off topic: there is a small and hard to notice "reply" link below every comment.

Re: Help with Rails?

#28

Post by gtani » Sun, Jul 14, 2013, 9:10 PM UTC

Are there ruby or rails user groups/meetups around you? If not, there's a bunch of mentor groups, or reddit seems pretty supportive. Stackoverflow is pretty good but there aren't enought people answering questions for the volume they're getting

http://www.railsmentors.org/

https://github.com/rails-oceania/roro/wiki/Available-mentors

http://www.reddit.com/r/rails/

http://installfest.railsbridge.org/installfest/ (Railsbridge is a fantastic organization, if you emailed i bet they would help

I've been going thru same thing, my MBP hard drive died, so i installed RVM, bundler, and rails 3.2 on a couple ubuntu 12.04 laptops while i'm waiting for my Snow leopard install DVD. The key insight is to write down every step if you have to back out. And read 2 or 3 blogs and see what they agree on before starting install. These are good for 12.04

http://excid3.com/blog/setting-up-ubuntu-12-04-with-ruby-1-9...

http://footyntech.wordpress.com/2012/09/19/installing-ruby-r...

Re: Help with Rails?

#29

Post by eccp » Sun, Jul 14, 2013, 9:13 PM UTC

Coming from a Windows-only background you'll find it's probably a much smoother experience while developing on a Linux desktop or in Mac OS X.

Installing a nice Ubuntu 13.04 desktop is not complex, there a video which explains installing Virtualbox and Ubuntu under ten minutes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WiiswmOH1Q ... note that a desktop is not required but given your background you would feel more comfortable having a desktop, graphical text editor (eg. gEdit or Sublime Text) and one or more terminals to run the commands.

Another option would be to install Cygwin, an Unix-like environment for Windows: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRB9t2tSsjY and continue the tutorial from there.

Honestly, I think that if you have sysadmin skills, it's likely you'll have some Unix exposure, and if you don't have yet, learning Ubuntu and Linux will be a benefit on the long run.

Re: Help with Rails?

#30

Post by losvedir » Sun, Jul 14, 2013, 9:19 PM UTC

Oh, boy. I've gotten our rails dev environment set up on a dozen different machines now and there's always a little problem here or there. One thing I can say right off the bat: I could never get it fully up and running on Windows, unfortunately.

But we have had success on both OS X and Linux machines.

The trick is to 1) install rbenv or rvm, 2) build the right version of ruby, 3) install the right gems, 4) make sure your PATH is set up properly.

The rails consultancy thoughtbot has a script you can run to just magically set up a new laptop for rails development. I don't do this (too magical, and too little control), but I usually pull up the script[1] just to remind myself of what things I need to attend to and install.

Feel free to hit me up at my email address in my profile if you're stumped on something. I've probably seen most issues by now...

[1] https://raw.github.com/thoughtbot/laptop/master/linux