Posted on by luis

What to do before you do Ruby on Rails development on Mac OS X Leopard

Apple has a new series about Ruby on Rails development on Mac OS X Leopard. Its a nice article to help get you going. One thing I’d like to reiterate is that it is good to lock down your RubyGems paths. This way you will always that your RubyGems go in the right directories that Apple has set up.

So before you follow the steps in the initial Developing Rails Applications on Mac OS X Leopard article, you should take the following steps:

  1. Open up ~/.bash_profile in your favorite editor (create it if its not already there)
  2. Type in 
    export GEM_HOME=/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8
  3. Type in 
    export GEM_PATH=/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8
  4. Save ~/.bash_profile
  5. Execute 
    source ~/.bash_profile

This makes it so that no matter what version of rubygems you have, you have access to the Apple-provided gems in $GEM_PATH and you’re able to install/update new gems in $GEM_HOME.