Every Flavour Beans

Installing Sun Java SE 6, Apache Maven 2 and Tomcat 5 on Ubuntu GNU/Linux

First go to System -> Administration -> Software Sources and make sure that the multiverse and universe Ubuntu repositories are enabled on your system.

Installing Java SE 6, Apache Maven 2 and Apache Tomcat 5.5 software is just one simple command on Ubuntu family of GNU/Linux operating systems:

I recommend setting JAVA_HOME environment variable to point to the JDK installation directory in your profile file(e.g. .bash_profile or /etc/profile):

The above command also installs the jetty web server which is especially good for development purposes.

See my previous posts to install Sun Java SE 6, Apache Tomcat 5.5/6, Apache Maven 2 on Windows and Ubuntu GNU/Linux operating systems:

Once all the required software components are installed, simply run the following command in the command prompt/shell to generate a basic Java web application project in the current working directory.

You can also run ‘mvn archetype:generate’ if you want to generate the project in interactive mode. The command will then prompt you for relevant information when creating the project.

After all the necessary files are downloaded, you will be shown a list of supported archetypes and will be prompted to select the one that you want to generate.

Enter the appropriate number to select the archetype that you want to generate; for example, enter 18 to create a basic Java Web Application project. Next you will be prompted to enter values for groupId(say ‘hello’), artifactId(say ‘HelloWorld’), version(you can accept the default and just press the ENTER key) and package(say ‘war’). You will then be asked for confirmation; type Y and press the ENTER key. For more information on what the above fields mean, read about Maven Co-ordinates.

To learn more about Maven’s archetype plugin, read Maven 2 Archetype plugin usage page.

You can run the basic Java web application project created above in Tomcat web server by running the following command.

(If this is the first time you are running the above command, it downloads a lot of necessary files and stores them in the local Maven repository. This is a one-time operation.) You can now access the web application from a location like “http://localhost:8080/HelloWorld/”. ‘HelloWorld’ is the artifactId that we used when creating the sample application. You can read more about running and deploying applications from Maven to Tomcat web server on Maven Tomcat plugin page.

If Jetty web server is installed on your computer, you can also run your web application in Jetty by running the following command:

How easy it is to switch the container when you are developing Java web applications with the Maven build tool! You can read more about running and deploying applications from Maven to Jetty web server on Maven 2 Jetty Plugin page.

Installation and setup instructions of Ruby on Rails web framework on different operating systems is covered in the following posts:

If you would rather use an IDE to develop Ruby on Rails applications, Aptana IDE is covered in "“Hello, World†Web Application in Ruby on Rails using Aptana Studio."

This post describes how to create a basic "Hello, World" web application in Rails using only console tools and a text editor. The instructions work pretty much the same for all operating systems with little to no modifications.

Make sure that you have the latest versions of all components installed:

(Output text might be slightly different on Windows OS but the version numbers should be the same.)

To create a new rails project, run the following command which generates the required directory structure for a rails application:

The purpose of each directory generated is more or less self-explanatory, like the test directory is for storing test files and the log directory contains various log files.

Rails application the scaffold generator way

Scaffolding allows us to generate template code necessary to directly run our application and play with it without having to write a single line of code. We can also open the generated files to take a peek at the generated code. We can then modify this code to our liking or just throw it away and write everything manually once we are satisfied with the prototype. The scaffolding code can be generated, say for a resource called 'person', by running the following command:

This command generates(among other files) a Rails migration file in db/xxx_create_people.rb which is responsible to create the database schema for our application; a model in app/models/person.rb; a controller in app/controllers/people_controller.rb and related view files in app/views/people directory. ('people' is used wherever plural of 'person' is needed.) Have a look at the code generated in the migration file:

Run the following commands to initialize the database:

Now we are ready to run the application and use it. Start the WEBrick web server:

Open your favourite web browser and go to http://localhost:3000/persons url. You should see a page similar to the following screenshot(after I added couple of entries using the "New Person" link):

Also make sure you look at the code generated in the controller file and the various view files!
Read the official Getting Started with Rails guide.
Read more Rails articles on this blog.

This is an adaptation to Fedora GNU/Linux platform of my previous posts meant for the Windows & Ubuntu platforms: Setting Up Rails Development Environment on Windows Vista/XP and Setting Up Rails Development Environment on Ubuntu GNU/Linux.

I can think of two different ways in which you might want to set up a development environment for Ruby on Rails on a GNU/Linux machine. One is to download everything outside of the package manager of your distribution i.e. build everything from the source. I am going to cover the second, easier way: how to setup Rails on a Fedora machine using its package manager for the most part. I show below how to setup Ruby, RubyGems, Rails, Mongrel, MySQL, and Git as part of the development stack.

Now you can create/checkout Rails applications, edit the files using your favourite text editor/IDE and run it under Mongrel. In future, I will try to write about developing Rails applications using integrated development environments like Eclipse and NetBeans.

Git is the favourite source code management tool of the Ruby on Rails community these days. Though GNU/Linux or Mac platforms are generally preferred to Windows by Ruby on Rails as well as git communities, I will show you how you can work with these technologies on Windows platform. I will also show how to host a git public/share repository of a Rails application on the Github free web service. Note that the following information applies to any project, not just Rails.

Refer to my earlier post to see how to install Ruby on Rails on the Windows platform. You can skip some of the later parts if you wish.

Setting Up Rails Development Environment on Windows Vista/XP

Git still has some issues on the Windows platform but for normal usage the msysgit package shouldn't let you down. Download and install it from its Google Code page.

Download msysgit for Windows

Read the information in last few dialog boxes carefully during the installation and select the settings you prefer. The following screenshots show the settings I have picked when installing msysgit on my system.

Install a separate git shell in which to run the git commands:

I can go to any git initialized directory, right-click a file and say "Git Bash Here" which will save me a lot of 'cd' commands:

Git's built-in SSH support is more than enough for development purposes:

Now you can just go to any Rails directory and run 'git init' there to track the files under git.

Start Git Bash shell from the Start Menu.

Go to your Rails directory and run the following commands.

Example session:

# cd hello
# ls
# git init
# git add .

For more git commands that you can use, refer to Git Tutorial. To learn more about how Git handles line ending conversions(especially important to Windows users), refer to gitattributes man page.

If you are working alone on a particular application or you are just interested in maintaining the history of the source code changes locally, then you might prefer just working with in the project directory. If I want to share the changes with friends/colleagues or the world at large, we need a public git repository. Github and Assembla are but only two examples that have good free packages to get started with.

Create a new account on Github.

Go to github.com Click the link "Pricing and Signup" at the top of the page.
Pick a package(say "Open source" which is free) and click "Signup" button.
Fill in the information and click "I agree, sign me up!" button if you agree to all the policies.

You need to enter your public SSH key when creating a Github account. If you don't already have SSH keys generated, you can generate one using git tools. Github website has nice explanation on how to go about setting up SSH key on Windows for Github, so just follow the procedure.

Once you have created the account and are logged in, click the "Create new one" link on the dashboard page, fill in the details and click the "Create Repository" button to create an empty repository on Github.

Now you can push the contents of your Rails directory to the empty git repository that we created on Github in the previous step by running the following command in Git Bash shell:

# cd hello
# git remote add origin git@github.com:tabrez/hello.git
# git push origin master

Adjust the second command according to your account/project details. Now you can say 'git push' from your git tracked directory anytime you want to publish your changes to Github, so that others can pull these changes to their computers and merge them with their local git repository.

Read more about git push.
Read more about Github.

I will try to write about more tools that help in being more productive with development with Rails in future articles.