Installing Rails from scratch

Going back to my roots

I have been a Ruby on Rails fan for a very long time.

Unfortunately, my career track did not lead me to use it professionally, so it turns out I haven't touched Rails since its … 3rd version 🥲

Now that I am back to building personal projects, I've decided to pick up Rails again.

Meaning I have to install the entire stack from scratch, so here are the notes to achieve that¹:

1. Install Ruby via rbenv

Looks like the landscape hasn't changed here and it's still RVM vs. rbenv!

I'm choosing rbenv for… reasons (mainly because it doesn’t mess with the environment/standard commands so much):

$ brew install rbenv 

Once installed, I can learn that the latest stable Ruby version is now 3.3.3:

$ rbenv install -l
3.1.6
3.2.4
3.3.3
jruby-9.4.7.0
mruby-3.3.0
picoruby-3.0.0
truffleruby-24.0.1
truffleruby+graalvm-24.0.1

Only latest stable releases for each Ruby implementation are shown.
Use `rbenv install --list-all' to show all local versions.

So let’s install it!

$ rbenv install 3.3.3

And make it the global Ruby version for my system:

$ rbenv global 3.3.3

For everything to work, don't forget to add the following to ~/.zshrc:

eval "$(rbenv init - zsh)"

2. Install Rails

As easy as it gets:

$ gem install rails

And voilà ! Ready to go 👍

1. On macOS, using Homebrew, and ZSH as shell