I don’t know about anyone else but compiling software is not one of my favourite pastimes. As I’ve been chopping and changing macs lately I thought I’d write a couple of shell scripts to get things right before running anything on my nice new (freshly installed) MacBook Pro.

h3. Prerequisites

There are a couple of prerequisites in addition to what’s on Dan’s “”What’s Needed”:http://hivelogic.com/narrative/articles/ruby-rails-mongrel-mysql-osx” list before running “the scripts”:http://svn.soniciq.com/public/rails/tools/osx_development_setup/. The first is that you must have MySQL installed as referenced in “Dan’s article”:http://hivelogic.com/narrative/articles/ruby-rails-mongrel-mysql-osx, and the second being the following:

Ensure you have the following line at the end of your ~/.bash_login file:

export PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/mysql/bin:$PATH"

You can add this by typing nano ~/.bash_login then copy and paste the above line into the end of the file. Once this is done, hit ctrl-x to exit, answering ‘y’ to “do you want to save changes” prompt.

h3. The scripts

There are two scripts, “01_osx_rails.sh”:http://svn.soniciq.com/public/rails/tools/osx_development_setup/01_osx_rails.sh and “02_osx_image_tools.sh”:http://svn.soniciq.com/public/rails/tools/osx_development_setup/02_osx_image_tools.sh and the following will explain how to use them.

h3. Creating your development environment

The first script will install everything in Dan’s article along with the following gems that I use frequently:
* rails version 1.1.6 for support of older rails apps
* bluecloth
* redcloth
* sqlite3-ruby
* ferret
* ZenTest
* redgreen

Right… here we go:

(please read “the licence”:http://svn.soniciq.com/public/rails/tools/osx_development_setup/MIT-LICENCE before running these scripts as although they have been tested on a clean install of Tiger, I can’t take any responsibility if something breaks)
# Download “01_osx_rails.sh”:http://svn.soniciq.com/public/rails/tools/osx_development_setup/01_osx_rails.sh to your desktop
# If you don’t wish to install all of these gems then open the file in a text editor and comment out the relevant lines with a hash.
# Open a new terminal window and type the following:

cd ~/Desktop
sh 01_osx_rails.sh

# Go make a cup of tea and watch all the pretty text scroll before your eyes.

That’s it, you should now have a fully working development environment.

h3. Image tools

I use a couple of image tools on my system, GD and ImageMagick (with RMagick). If you wish to install these tools and the related libraries, run the following:

(This script hasn’t been tested as much as the previous one so use at your own risk. If anyone has any bug fixes then please post a comment)

cd ~/Desktop
sh 02_osx_image_tools.sh

h3. We’re done

Please let me know if I’ve missed anything obvious.

I hope this helps anyone else out there with Compilaphobia!