When I first started with the notion of doing Ruby on Rails, I had it in my head that I wanted to do it the “right” way. The “right” way, in my head, was to use it on the platform that it was written for; Linux.

I’ve always been a Windows guy, but I’ve never shied away from a challenge, so I took the bull by the horns and sat down to write a Ruby on Rails app. I got gored…and trampled…and mauled…and, well you get the idea.

Call me a sissy, but I was used to point and click installers. So, something that I thought would be easy wound up being significantly more difficult that I had expected.

I guess I underestimated it, after all, I had to learn everything from scratch; the operating system (although I’ve had some UNIX training in the past), the database, the web server, the programming language, and finally the web application framework.

I wanted to compile a set of notes for myself for when I have to do it again, so I wrote up some steps to get Ruby on Rails installed on Debian Sarge with a MySQL database, Lighttpd. This includes integration with the version control software, Subversion and walks through how to create a database and a simple lighttpd.conf file.

It should really detail the deployment application Capistrano, but I wanted to do the stuff hands on before learning a system with a level of abstraction. Maybe I’ll write up those notes when I get there.

The notes are just a simple text file and I’m always amenable to updating it in case I’m doing something horribly inefficient. Hopefully, they’ll save a newbie some time and anguish.