What just happened? Installing Rails.

I have decided to try out this RoR. It looks like something I have wanted for a long time. I have had past experince with ASP, PHP, etc.

Following the links provided in the sticky at the top of this forum I installed Ruby. I already had MySQL and then I went to install Rails. But the details don't tell me everything.

Rails - I typed the command 'gem install rails --remote' and after a few moments I got 'Successfully installed rails-2.3.4, 1 gem installed.' What is a gem?

Do I have to set up a server on my machine? I have been reading a lot of stuff, but so many assume the answers are obvious that they don't mention the details.

I am going to start with a couple of the tutorials I saw while browsing. But I wanted to get a jump on understanding what was going on.

Hi Scott,

I'm a beginner myself, but I think I can answer your questions.

Ruby gems is a ruby package manager, through which you can install various versions of Rails and other packages. A gem is a package.

Rails comes with a server. To get started, first run 'rails test', which will create a test directory, and everything inside it you'll need. Then 'cd test'. then 'ruby script/server' will start the web server (called WEBrick), by default on port 3000.

If everything works on the first try, you're very lucky. Different versions of Ruby/Gems/Rails have various issues, and you might end up doing a lot of googling to get everything square away. Also, as of some version, the default database for Rails is now SQLite 3. You can still use MySQL, but you need to pass some option to the 'rails' command, and I don't know it off hand.

Cheers,
Kirkland

Thanks for your reply. I got it working just as you described and got to the "You're riding.." screen. Now I am dealing with a problem regarding scaffold. As you say, a lot of time with Google and reading. I getting the big picture, but most of the tutorials are leaving out some important details.