Setting Up Ubuntu for Rails

by John W. Long on May 3, 2007

I just found a wonderful little screencast by Geoffrey Grosenbach of Peep Code Screencasts on setting up the full Rails stack on Ubuntu. He’s uploaded it so that anyone can watch it over on the ShowMeDo website.

From the description:

This 10 minute demo shows how easy it is to install Ruby, Rails, Apache, Mongrel, Subversion, and MySQL on an Ubuntu server. Capistrano and the deprec gem (deployment recipes) are used to automate the installation process with only a few commands. It finishes with a deployment of a Rails app to the newly built server!

The demo is done with Parallels on a Mac, but would work with any machine that can boot from the Ubuntu 6.06 Live CD.

Props to Geoffrey for his great work with helping Rails newbies (and even “old timers” like me) get their feet wet.

Two Rails Testing Plugins

by John W. Long on May 3, 2007

I just released two Rails plugins that should make testing a little easier for some of you.

  • The test_helpers plugin makes it easy to DRY up your test cases by moving shared code into modules. It includes the handy dandy “test_helper” class method to make requiring and including a snap.
  • The abstract_testcases plugin makes it easy to create abstract test cases that don’t complain about tests not being defined. If you’d rather not go the module route, this is the plugin for you.

Installation is just like any other Rails plugin:

$ script/plugin source http://wiseheartdesign.com/svn/plugins/
$ script/plugin install test_helpers
$ script/plugin install abstract_testcases

Comments and feedback are welcome.