Ruby & Rails on 1und1 VPS

July 24, 2008

As a VPS @ 1und1 is one of the well-configured VPS I’ve ever seen, I post this little HowTo to get things done…

Targets:

• Get the OS working, especially the package manager
• Install Ruby (1.8.6)
• Install Rails (2.0.2)

Environment:

• OS: CentOS 5
• Plesk 8.4

Hey ho, let’s go:

1. Get yum working
   As yum IS NOT working after the automated OS install, we will start here.
   Yum complains about 2 packages missing:

   python-iniparse
   yum-fastestmirror

   You can get them on a mirror listed here. Install them with rpm -ivh. Now yum should work. As the preset package sources suck, I propose that you edit the config in /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo. You can look at my config for reference.

   As gcc ISN’T installed, you should install it. Also you should install mysql-devel.

2. Install Ruby
   Download Ruby from it’s website. Extract it. Install it:

   $ make
   $ make install

   In my case I had problems with zlib and openssl. To fix this, check if zlib and zlib-devel are installed. Also you have to go in the extracted Ruby sourcefolder and install it by hand. To do so, make follow this steps:

   $ cd rubysource
   $ cd ext
   $ cd zlib
   $ ruby extconf.rb
   $ make
   $ make install

   Do the same for openssl. If you want to use mysql, get the C library. Here’s the source and the manual.
   Now get rubygems. You should take version 1.1.1. Now your Ruby installation should be fine. Now install Rails:

   $ cd rubysource
   $ gem install rails -v 2.0.2

Now Ruby & Rails should be up and running. Hope this helps :)

Filed under: Hacks & Voodoo, _dev | Comments (2)