(cross-posted from Yehuda’s Blog)

So people have been attempting to get a Rails app up and running recently. I also have some apps in development on Rails 3, so I’ve been experiencing some of the same problems many others have.

The other night, I worked with sferik to start porting merb-admin over to Rails. Because this process involved being on edge Rails, we got the process honed to a very simple, small, repeatable process.

The Steps

Step 1: Install bundler (version 0.8.1 required)

$ sudo gem install bundler

Step 2: Check out Rails

$ git clone git://github.com/rails/rails.git
$ cd rails

Step 3: Bundle Rails dependencies

$ gem bundle --only default

Step 4: Generate a new app

$ ruby railties/bin/rails ../new_app --dev
$ cd ../new_app

Done

Everything should now work: script/server, script/console, etc.

When you execute rails APP_NAME --dev, it will create a new Rails application with a Gemfile pointing to your Rails checkout and bundle it right after.

Also notice that in Step 3 we pass --only default to the bundle command. This will skip bundling of both mysql and pg (for postgresql) gems.

Enjoy!

Updated on 01/15/2010 – Rewrote steps to include gem install bundler and use rails APP_NAME --dev.