Hugo Peixoto

Ubuntu, rvm and contributing to rails

Published on September 13, 2009

Table of contents

I wanted to write a couple of patches for the rails gem, so I needed to clone the rails repository and install all the gem dependencies with bundler. Unfortunately, my bundler installation doesn’t work very well, as I screwed something up when installing several versions of ruby. So I decided to create a virtual machine with Ubuntu and install everything with rvm. I’ll describe all the steps I took after the VM installation. I used Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS, so your mileage may vary.

Initial setup

I started by installing the ssh server. This step is completely unrelated to the ruby business, but it allowed me to connect to the server from my laptop

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hugopeixoto@ruby$ sudo aptitude install ssh

Then, I installed a couple of packages that rvm will need.

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hugopeixoto@ruby$ sudo aptitude install bash curl git-core

rvm installation

To install rvm, I decided to go with a system-wide installation. This makes the rubies available to all the users instead of just the one used in the installation process. To do this, I just needed to execute their system-wide installation script.

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hugopeixoto@ruby$ sudo su -
root@ruby# bash < <( curl -L http://bit.ly/rvm-install-system-wide )

Now that it is installed, there were a couple of extra steps I had to take to be able to install the rubies. First, there are some required packages so that the rubies can be installed from source. Additionally, rvm must be loaded when your shell launches so that you can use the rvm commands. The two following commands were ran as root:

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hugopeixoto@ruby$ sudo su -
root@ruby# aptitude install build-essential bison openssl \
           libreadline6 libreadline6-dev curl git-core zlib1g \
           zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libyaml-dev libsqlite3-0 \
           libsqlite3-dev sqlite3 libxml2-dev libxslt-dev \
           autoconf libc6-dev
root@ruby# echo '[[ -s "/usr/local/lib/rvm" ]] && source "/usr/local/lib/rvm"' > /etc/profile.d/rvm.sh

After doing that, you are ready to install any version of ruby and using it. For example, say you want to have ruby 1.8.7, 1.9.1 and 1.9.2 and that you want to use, for now, 1.9.1. Just type:

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root@ruby# rvm install 1.8.7
root@ruby# rvm install 1.9.1
root@ruby# rvm install 1.9.2
root@ruby# rvm 1.9.1

And you’re done. If you want to install rails, now, just type:

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root@ruby# gem install rails

Contributing to rails

In order to make modifications to the rails source code and run the tests, you want to check out the lastest version of rails. This can be pulled from their git repository:

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hugopeixoto@ruby$ git clone git@github.com:rails/rails.git

You also need to install additional gems and system libraries. All the gems required to test rails can be installed using the bundler gem:

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hugopeixoto@ruby$ gem install bundler

You can decide if you want to test mysql and postgresql. If you don’t, just run

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hugopeixoto@ruby$ sudo aptitude install libxslt-dev
hugopeixoto@ruby$ cd rails
hugopeixoto@ruby:~/rails$ bundle install --without db

Otherwise, you need to install the databases and their client development packages:

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hugopeixoto@ruby$ sudo aptitude install libxslt-dev libmysqlclient-dev libpq-dev
hugopeixoto@ruby$ cd rails
hugopeixoto@ruby:~/rails$ bundle install --without db

Note that installing and configuring both mysql and postgresql servers is not covered here. View the rails guide on contributing for more details on this.

This is pretty much it! Now you just need to make your changes, and run the tests to see if anything is broken:

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hugopeixoto@ruby:~/rails$ rake test