One-stop Ruby on Rails packages

You want Ruby on Rails, and you want it now. The trouble is, you don’t have Apache or MySQL on your home computer. You could install and configure those huge programs, but you’re not trying to turn your desktop into a full web server. You could put Ruby on Rails onto your big production server at work, but you just want to try it out, and you may not have the priveledges to install it anyway.

Fortunately there’s a third option, that doesn’t involve complicated dependencies, hand compilation, or ritualistic chicken sacrifice (just in case you were wondering). Actually, 3 third options, depending on what platform you’re running at home. All of them are easy to set up, and they deliver everything you need for a full-fledged Ruby on Rails environment.

Instant Rails has plans to make Linux, OSX, and BSD ports, but as of this writing, they have yet to appear. These 3 packages have their own nuances, but anything that’s standard Ruby on Rails should work well on them. (Most of the differences have to do with what web and database servers they use.)

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