I’m up to perhaps my third or fourth attempt to get Ruby on Rails installed and working. It’s been complicated by the fact that I’m running a non-current OS (OS X 10.3) and Locomotive seems fine, but then when I get to a particular step (yesterday, generating models) it all just stops.

So back to basics. I started over and used the current Hivelogic installation guide which is actually written for 10.4, which had some problems on 10.3, but generally it went quite smoothly.

Tips for using the 10.4 installation on 10.3:

• Backup before you start, of course! No responsibility taken if you hose your OS!
  Make sure you have xcode installed: the article calls for xcode 2, but version 1 which shipped with 10.3 worked fine for me. Or you can download it from Apple’s site.
• Because my iBook is old and slow, I prefer to download tarballs outside of terminal, and drop them to the desktop.
• Go through the list of applications needed in the article. Each code snippet to install gives the ftp URLs. Check for new versions before you download: several of the applications listed have had updates since the article was written.
• Follow the instructions all the way through, excluding curl if you downloaded the tarballs already. If your computer is slow like mine, this will take a good chunk out of your afternoon.
• If you are using CocoaMySQL as a MySQL manager, be sure to download the beta version: password authentication changed in MySQL v.5+ which the standard version of CocoaMySQL doesn’t support.

You’re done! Follow along with a screencast or grab a book, and get started!