This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Tobias Luetke. Original Post: Installing rails made easy Feed Title: too-biased Feed URL: http://blog.leetsoft.com/xml/rss/ Feed Description: Read the announcement: CD Baby rewrite in Postgres and Ruby, Baby!CD Baby is going rails. This is huge! If you don’t know CD Baby, its a distribution site with over 80.000 musicians under contract and its one of the biggest digital distributors of audio to Apple iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody, etc.  Read all about it here. What is even more exciting about it is that I’m on board for the rewrite and I had chance to talk to Derek on the phone directly for a consulting session which might have played its little part in the decision to go with rails. Come monday I’ll work together with him and other rails contributor Jeremy Kemper to help crunch those 90k lines of PHP in beautifully compact code for which Rails and Ruby are known. Here is a quote from Derek’s announcement on his weblog: Like a lost soul walkin’ the earth, lookin’ for spirituality, that stumbles upon the right church with the right people at the right time, I’ve found my niche with Ruby. Its little itty-bitty community attracts some brilliant “think different” types with a love for beautiful code that do this for love, not money. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Tobias Luetke Latest Posts From too-biased

Many webhosts are starting to offer fastcgi as more and more customers are moving to rails and similar projects. There is hope that the mod_’s will die out as fastcgi can provide the same services in a simpler, faster, memory saving and flexible manner.

Today I read that dreamhost enabled fastcgi service for their shared customers. One problem with shared servers is that you don’t have a lot of influence on the installed ruby and rails version. To fix this they offer a very nice script which installs ruby and rails locally in your home directory for you.

I expanded this script a bit and made it more general purpose. So if you are thinking of installing rails and ruby on a shell go ahead and type:

This will get you ruby 1.8.2 the latest ruby gems, the latest rails version as well as the gems with the C versions of fcgi and mysql.

Hope that helps.