Question

After installing Ruby and Ruby Gems:

$ sudo apt-get install ruby rubygems
...
$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.7 (2010-06-23 patchlevel 299) [i686-linux]
$ gem -v
1.3.7

If I try to install Rails I get an error, and even though it seems to be the documentation only, rails isn’t installed:

$ sudo gem install rails
...
Successfully installed rails-3.0.1
24 gems installed
... 
Installing ri documentation for builder-2.1.2...
ERROR:  While generating documentation for builder-2.1.2
... MESSAGE:   Unhandled special: Special: type=17, text="<!-- HI -->"
... RDOC args: --ri --op /var/lib/gems/1.8/doc/builder-2.1.2/ri --title Builder -- Easy XML Building --main README --line-numbers --quiet lib CHANGES Rakefile README doc/releases/builder-1.2.4.rdoc doc/releases/builder-2.0.0.rdoc doc/releases/builder-2.1.1.rdoc --title builder-2.1.2 Documentation
(continuing with the rest of the installation)
...
Installing ri documentation for rails-3.0.1...
File not found: lib

$ rails -v
The program 'rails' is currently not installed.  You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install rails

Ubuntu repositories only have Rails 2.3.5 so that isn’t an option.

How do I get Rails to install properly?

Update: I tried the following, no error this time, but still no success:

$ sudo gem install rails --no-rdoc --no-ri
Successfully installed rails-3.0.1
1 gem installed
$ rails -v
The program 'rails' is currently not installed...

Update 2: So, thanks to Maran and Jörg, I now know the problem is not that rails isn’t installed, but it’s not added to the PATH. This can be fixed by adding the following to ~/.bashrc:

export PATH=/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin:$PATH

That raises a further question: What should have added that to the PATH? Presumably the apt-get install rubygems? And what else may be broken?

Answer 1

Ok, I hesitated to use rvm as it seemed to be aimed at solving problems I didn’t intend to have (multiple ruby versions? c’mon, I just want to play with rails…) and installing from source is generally something I want to avoid…

Anyway, I gave in and followed along with http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/rvm/install/

$ bash < <( curl http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/releases/rvm-install-head )

Then (mostly suggested by the output of the above, but I needed to add libmysqlclient-dev):

$ sudo aptitude install build-essential bison openssl libreadline5 \
                        libreadline5-dev curl git zlib1g zlib1g-dev \
                        libssl-dev libsqlite3-0 libsqlite3-dev sqlite3 \
                        libxml2-dev libmysqlclient-dev

Then I edited my .bashrc as required and opened a new terminal.

$ rvm install 1.9.2
$ rvm --default use 1.9.2
$ ruby -v
ruby 1.9.2p0 (2010-08-18 revision 29036) [i686-linux]
$ gem install rails
$ rails -v
Rails 3.0.1

After creating a new project, I still had a few things to do to make it work:

$ rails new myproject --database=mysql
$ cd myproject
$ emacs config/database.yml # set passwords
$ bundle install
$ rake db:create
$ rails server

And finally it all seems to be working. I hope that helps someone else, it certainly wasn’t a particularly pleasant intro to a framework. I’ve reordered the commands I actually entered to avoid double handling for anyone following along.