Ruby on Rails 3 and MySQL on Ubuntu 10.10

Ruby on Rails has become my favorite web framework recently. The sheer speed factor of development is incredible, and once you get past the learning curve, you can build anything in a short matter of time.

Recently my Asus laptop’s graphics card has become supported in the Ubuntu kernel so I now have a dual booting machine running both Windows 7 and Ubuntu. This is particularly handy now as I can use this laptop for development in Rails.

The steps aren’t hard to figure out on your own if you’re familiar with the tools, but this is what I did to get Rails 3 with MySQL on Ubuntu 10.10.

Installing Rails from Terminal

sudo apt-get install ruby-full

wget production.cf.rubygems.org/rubygems/rubygems-1.3.7.tgz

tar -xvf rubygems-1.3.7.tgz

cd rubygems-1.3.7/

sudo ruby setup.rb

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/bin/gem

sudo gem install rdoc

sudo gem install rails

Installing MySQL Server from Terminal

sudo apt-get install mysql-server libmysqlclient-dev libmysql-ruby

Setting up your first Rails project

It seems that Rails 3 depends on sqlite3 even if you don’t intend to use it as the backend for your application. We’ll create an example rails app to make sure everything is working.

sudo apt-get install libsqlite3-dev build-essential

rails new example

cd example/

bundle install

rake db:create

rails s

Now fire up your browser, and go to and you should be greeted with a nice little rails homepage.

**UPDATE: **I recently just ran these commands over again and ran into a “File not found: lib” error. After a bit of googling, I found this and appended the solution into the instructions above: