Hivelogic: Building Ruby, Rails, LightTPD, and MySQL on Tiger

If you want to develop, run, and test Ruby on Rails web apps locally on your Mac, you’re going to want to install MySQL, Rails, and a newer version of Ruby than the version that ships from Apple. You’re also going to be happier using the LightTPD web server than the pure-Ruby (and thus somewhat slow, even for testing) WEBrick.

My friend and colleague Dan Benjamin first published these instructions in December last year, but he’s kept them up-to-date as newer versions of the various components have been released. Dan’s instructions are comprehensive, well-written, and, most importantly, show you how to install all this stuff the right way, such that they don’t clobber Mac OS X’s standard components.

★ Tuesday, 21 November 2006