Question

As an example, I want to download: https://github.com/banker/newsmonger and tinker with it (to learn Rails). I’ve downloaded the zip and when I go into that folder and type rails server, the terminal window says to create a new rails app

Answer 1

This is a Rails 2 application, and so as ennuikiller said, you’ll need to run script/server.

You may run into problems with dependencies not being installed in this application, which is a problem that normally (now) would be solved with Bundler. Due to this being a Rails 2 application, it doesn’t support Bundler out of the box and the owner of the repo hasn’t updated it to support that, and so you’re dead outta luck there.

What you’ll need to do is attempt to run rake gems:install (which may or may not work, depending on the sun’s positioning) which will install the gems specified in config/environment.rb and the proper config/environments files using the config.gem methodology. This was how it was done in Rails 2, and caused so many problems that Bundler was created.

If that doesn’t work, contact that banker guy on GitHub and ask him what the deps are or work out the dependencies yourself.

Good luck!