Setting up Ruby on Rails on a "High Performance VPS" plan

After you have ordered the VPS, if you have not done so already, make sure you install the development tools package for your VPS.  Now login to the VPS via SSH and download the curent recommended version of Ruby as recommended by "http://www.rubyonrails.org/down".  As time goes on, you will need to substitute the versions and packages that I list here in my commands with the curent distribution, this is just an outline you can use to follow.  I always use the /usr/src/redhat/ area to store all my build work, but anywere really works.  Here are the commands I used:


cd /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES/
wget http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.6-p286.tar.gz
cd ../BUILD/
tar xpzf ../SOURCES/ruby-1.8.6-p286.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.8.6-p286/


At this point you will probably want to browse through the README (either "cat README" or "less README") so you can have a good idea about what to do, and what is going on.  Read through the "* How to compile and install" section so that you can make sure and you take care of any options and configurations appropriate to your installation needs.  Then run make to compile the sofware:


make
make test # optional to run tests to make sure the build functions
make install


Now you will want to install RubyGems which is the standard Ruby package manager.  Once again, when you read this, the package versions may be different, and you will need to substitute the curent distributions in what I have listed below.  Just go to http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=126 and use the most recent distribution.


cd /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES/
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/38646/rubygems-1.2.0.tgz
cd ../BUILD/
tar xpzf ../SOURCES/rubygems-1.2.0.tgz
cd rubygems-1.2.0/
ruby setup.rb


As always, you will want to review the notes in the output of the last command above, so that you have a good background and understanding of what is going on, if you don't already know.  Now, following the next steps listed on "http://www.rubyonrails.org/down", you can install Rails using the following command:


gem install rails


Now, as quoted from "http://www.rubyonrails.org/down" there are other plugins that can be installed, but that is up to you to decide.  Now all you need to do to get up and running is:

"Create your application skeleton and start the server:

rails path/to/your/new/application
cd path/to/your/new/application
ruby script/server

You're running Ruby on Rails! Follow the instructions on http://localhost:3000."