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Ruby Ruby Foundations Ruby Basics Installing Ruby

Posted by Adam Zuckerberg
Adam Zuckerberg
22,248 Points

Totally totally confused. At minute 5:20 is this just for Mac users or both?

Totally confusing that they bundled this course next to the install course on the Ruby track and also squeezed the Mac install info into the same video as the Windows install video. I am so confused now after installing 15 applications in the Ruby track and am now on this totally confusing video - not sure where the Mac instructions start and end - is this a git install for Windows and Mac or just Mac - can you guess re-do this track and video. Totally circumnavigation. Totally, totally confused.

1 Answer

Eric Carey
Eric Carey
6,820 Points
Eric Carey
Eric Carey
6,820 Points

Just went back and glanced through that video. I agree; the transition between the two parts of the video is quite quick. The OSX stuff starts on minute 2:00, and it sounds like that's the system you're using. If so, basically what you're doing is this:

  • Install GCC from GitHub (you have this already if you've installed Xcode).
  • Install Homebrew. This is a package manager similar to "apt-get" or "aptitude", if you've used any Debian variant of Linux. Basically it makes keeping Git up to date a lot easier, as you can just run "git brew update" whenever you need to and it'll grab updates automatically.
  • Install Git. This one's a bit easier. Just run brew install git.
  • Install RVM. Ruby Version Manager is brilliant. Lets you have multiple versions of Ruby co-existing on your system without overlap. Makes updating and testing in Ruby much less of a pain.
  • Install Ruby. For this, just type rvm install (ruby version number here) into Terminal.
  • And finally, tell RVM to use the version you just installed with rvm use (ruby version number here).

It sounds like a crazy amount of work, and to an extent it is, but once this is done you have a system that's much easier to update and work with (as a developer, that is) than if you installed Git and Ruby manually. Though really, they could have move the Homebrew and Git installs to a different video and it would be far less confusing.

If you're actually on Windows, then I misunderstood you and you can ignore most of what I just wrote :D