Installing Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu is quite easy, but the Ubuntu packages install an outdated Ruby. The following instruction will probably work on older Ubuntu versions also, I just used the 14.04 test release to get a preview on the next LTS version of Ubuntu.
This is just a quick install without RVM. If you want a more flexible and sipler setup, where you more easily switch between Ruby and Rails version, you can follow the instructions here to install it with rbenv.
For a quick comparison between rbenv en RVM you can read this
Install latest ruby from source
First install some debs.
sudo apt-get install curl curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --ruby source /home/acidjunk/.rvm/scripts/rvm sudo apt-get install nodejs
Optionally you can install a newer version of nodejs by using a non Ubuntu repo:
sudo apt-get install python-software-properties sudo apt-add-repository -y ppa:chris-lea/node.js sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get nodejs
Then install Ruby itself and let RVM do the hard lifting. Check if you have a working gem by running “gem -v”; expected output:
2.2.2
Note: you probably want to add the new gem path to your profile. This session it will work because you runned: “source /home/acidjunk/.rvm/scripts/rvm”
Install latest ruby and Rails itself
rvm use ruby-2.1.1@rails4.0 --create gem install rails
Test your install
mkdir rails_projects cd rails_projects mkdir helloworld cd helloworld rails new . rails server
Expected output:
=> Booting WEBrick => Rails 4.0.4 application starting in development on http://0.0.0.0:3000 => Run `rails server -h` for more startup options => Ctrl-C to shutdown server [2014-04-05 17:40:12] INFO WEBrick 1.3.1 [2014-04-05 17:40:12] INFO ruby 2.1.1 (2014-02-24) [x86_64-linux] [2014-04-05 17:40:12] INFO WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=3497 port=3000
A screenshot of the running Rails install
rbenv
Installing Rails with rbenv is also easy: just follow the instructions here.