Installing Ruby on Rails on Fedora 16

I had somewhat of a hard time setting up a machine for my Ruby on Rails experiments but fortunately I was able to set up one after banging my head on the wall several times and with the help of several internet articles. So, here’s what I did:

1. First make sure you have apache, curl, git, mysql, sqlite and node.js installed (You might not need all of them). For this simply run the following command:

sudo yum install -y httpd, curl, git, mysql, mysql-server, sqlite, sqlite-devel, nodejs

If you can’t get nodejs installed, try the following command:

sudo yum install –nogpgcheck http://nodejs.tchol.org/repocfg/fedora/nodejs-stable-release.noarch.rpm

2. Next, install RVM (Ruby Version Manager)

curl -L get.rvm.io | bash -s stable
source ~/.rvm/scripts/rvm

Find other requirements for RVM, and install those too

rvm requirements

3. Install Ruby

rvm install 1.9.3

This will install both Ruby and Rubygems. If you get an error while installing rubygems, such as the following:
The requested url does not exist: ‘http://production.cf.rubygems.org/rubygems/rubygems-1.8.24.tgz’
Trying ftp:// URL instead.
curl: (6) Could not resolve host: production.cf.rubygems.org; Name or service not known
There was an error, please check /home/vikram/.rvm/log/ruby-1.9.2-p320/*.log
There has been an error while trying to fetch the source.
Halting the installation

You will have to install Rubygems separately. Otherwise skip to Step 5

Check Ruby version

ruby -v

4. Install Rubygems
Download http://production.cf.rubygems.org/rubygems/rubygems-1.8.24.tgz

wget http://production.cf.rubygems.org/rubygems/rubygems-1.8.24.tgz

Extract the file

tar -zxvf rubygems-1.8.24.tgz

Install

cd rubygems-1.8.24
ruby setup.rb

5. Set default Ruby version

rvm use 1.9.3 –default

6. Install Rails

gem install rails

This will take a moment

7. Check Rails version

rails -v

Fortunately, it worked for me! If you run into additional problems check the following websites:
RVM: https://rvm.io/
Node.js: http://nodejs.tchol.org/
Rails: http://rubyonrails.org/download
Gems: http://rubygems.org/pages/download

UPDATE: Fedora 17 has a Ruby 1.9.3 yum package. After you install that, install rails (Step 6)