Is the standard Ruby for Mac OSX 10.5 “good enough” for Rails development?

Question

OSX 10.5 comes with Ruby 1.8.6, I think, but I see a lot of tutorials that recommend installing the latest version of Ruby from source. I did this in the past, and it caused minor problems in the future if I install something that expects Ruby to be in the default location, and that is not (like the Phusion Passenger panel).

What am I interested in if the standard version of Ruby is good enough for development use, so that there are no conflicts or multiple versions of Ruby floating around? Obviously the default versions of Rubygems and Rails need updating, but I wonder about the standard version of Ruby that comes with 10.5.

Answer 1

1.8.6 will be good for a local block. Personally, I always establish what is on the production box - usually Ruby Enterprise - but yes, if you do not want to deal with the bustle of participating in the replacement of rubies completely, there is no big trouble waiting for you with a margin.

If you want to keep the current (perhaps a good idea for a serious application) and make sure you use the same ruby ​​as your production environment, you can try this tutorial (I used the previous iteration) to handle these problems.

Answer 2

Rails 3 will require Ruby 1.8.7, and we already recommend 1.8.7 for Rails 2.3.4. I highly recommend updating.

Answer 3

The Rails team recommends Ruby 1.8.7 for creating Rails with any of the latest releases.

I also highly recommend using the same version of Ruby for development as in your production environment. Avoid surprises.

Answer 4

The Ruby on Rails download page recommends 1.8.7, but says 1.8.6 is still working, and I find no problems.

Answer 5

I personally don't like the Ruby implementation on Mac, since I had a lot of problems with MySql, Postgres and other gems, there were always obscure compilation problems that required me to install Xcode and then compile all kinds of obscure libraries. In the end I decided your problems by installing Ubuntu 8.10 on VirtualBox for Mac, and now everything works fine !!!!

Also, when I switched to Snow Leapard, I had a lot of Ruby stones. In addition, I would recommend using Ruby 1.9, which is certainly much faster than 1.8.6 IMHO, again, works best on Ubuntu, not Mac.

I guess I would also like to add that many Unix Christians disagree with me on this post, since you can make it work on a Mac, but I think I'm just lazy and prefer to have things work out of the box.

Answer 6

I run REE (Ruby Enterprise Edition) simply because it runs my specifications faster than the regular version (about 20%, and sometimes more).

It's also nice that it comes with a passenger and some other things you usually want.