Setting up Intel Mac for Rails development

I am happy to report back that I had no problems switching to MacOS as my development server. Moreover, MacOS interface felt just natural – as if I always knew how to use it. It could be because of all the things that Ubuntu and GNOME has taken from MacOS, like the preferences dialog, and privileged commands (sudo). I also felt readily productive in MacOS once I figured out how to launch the terminal. Bash and VIM, my two favorite console tools were already installed. Here is a report on the tools I configured to migrate from Ubuntu:

Firefox

As of writing, Firefox official releases were only for PowerPC, which runs extremely slow emulated on the Intel platform. I had to get the bleeding edge build of Firefox Universal Binary. Fortunately, you can grab the official release now.

Ruby on Rails 1.1.1

After googling around for a few hours and trying different RoR packagers, I found a nice, non-intrusive Mac Intel package at Todd Huss’s blog. Unlike Locomotive, which is a PowerPC application that hides the underlying Rails infrastructure, Todd’s package gives you a simple directory structure with Ruby and the basic gems that you can drop anywhere on your filesystem.

MySQL 5.0

MySQL was a breeze. Just head on over to the official MySQL site and grab the Mac x86 version.

DarwinPorts

Okay, here’s where it gets interesting: Before I can install RMagick (ImageMagick) and Subversion for Intel, I need to setup DarwinPorts so that I can compile my own binaries. For DarwinPorts, I need Xcode. So, I grabbed the latest Intel compatible Xcode from Apple’s Developer Connection. Grabbed and installed Darwin Ports from here, and followed instructions on RubyForge to install ImageMagick and RMagick.

Subversion and Lighttpd

With DarwinPorts installed, installing subversion and lighttpd were a matter of single commands:

port install subversion port install lighttpd

I used svnadmin to create a new svn respository, copied my svn repository from Ubuntu, and voila! All my versioned files and change history is migrated. Don’t you love it when software just works? Hope this post was helpful to anyone trying to setup an Intel Mac as a Rails development server.