Preparing Ruby on Rails environment – netbeans
In previous steps we have configured ruby and apache, now time to get development environment, there is wide range of tools but we will use Netbeans as it is … quite good.
So on beginning please download Netbeans, please go to it’s download site and get “C/C++” or “PHP” version – they are smaller from the ruby version, we need to update the environment after download so we would download many components again.
After download run the Netbeans installation, it is very simple so just follow the on screen instructions. When Netbeans is installed please run it and go to Tools Menu -> Plugins, there select available plugins and select:
- Ruby and Rails
- Ruby Extra Hints
- Extra Ruby Color Themes
Do not install “Glasfish” or “JRuby” this is needed only for JRuby development which is not production ready, as some people think.
Additionally to installation You can perform update of the installed plugins in the Updates tab, after update and installation Netbeans will ask You to do restart to activate newly installed plugins, please follow it’s instructions.
When we have installed required plugins we can check that Netbeans sees our ruby installation, go to Tools Menu -> Ruby Platforms, here you will see yours ruby installations and it’s configuration, If you do not see any platform go threw the wizard under button Add Platform.
This is the development environmnet, in next part we will start a new project with it.
Hi again,
Please add this to the NetBeans Community Docs wiki as a Tips & Tricks entry. Thanks!
–James Branam
NetBeans Community Docs Manager
Hi,
My name is James Branam and I’m the NetBeans Community Docs Manager. Your blog entry would make a Tips and Tricks entry for our Community Docs wiki (http://wiki.netbeans.org//CommunityDocs). Would you be willing to contribute it? If you need any help or have any questions, please contact me at james.branam@sun.com. I look forward to hearing from you.
I’m sorry but I’m not using Windows for development, as I know Rails is not fully supported on Windows, please refer to RailsOnWindows. Using Linux or Mac should be a lot better choice for developing rails.
I was hoping to use NetBeans 6.5 to start learning / working with Ruby on Rails, but ran into lots of problems with regards to updating Ruby Gems.
The problem seems to be that not all of the gems are distributed in pre-compiled form. I read somewhere that Visual C++ 6 needs to be installed in order to compile them. I have Visual C++ .NET 2008 Express installed, added the path to the compiler executables, nmake, etc. but it still would not compile the gems. ferret was an example gem (at the time I tried – a couple of months ago) that would not compile.
I find that running NetBeans on Ubuntu Linux has no problems compiling the gems.
Are there any handy work arounds for Windows users?