Some thoughts, ideas and fun!!!

Overview

So, after writing numerous articles on this site and having to copy and paste the requirements to do certain things from one article to the next and having to go back to them when there were updates, I decided to write a short little article around the requirements for the various environments I discuss on this site.  I can then use this as a good starting point and simply reference it from my other articles.  Something like writing an Object Oriented article hierarchy 🙂  Anyway, so I’ll be covering the following in this article.

1. Ubuntu Requirements
2. Git Requirements
3. Java Requirements
4. Ruby Version Manager (RVM) Requirements
5. Ruby Requirements
6. RubyMine Requirements
7. Apache Requirements
8. Conclusion

The idea is simple, when you have the complete set of requirements I mention in this article you should be more or less set to run any and all environments.  Personally I would suggest that you start at the top and install everything I have here, but that is up to you.  If I missed something, please leave me a message and I’ll add it straight away.

Ubuntu Requirements

I usually finish my Ubuntu install by running the following installs.  This ensures that I have everything to set up a Ruby and RVM environment that works and that I don’t run into unforeseen issues while installing other tools.  If you want to know what they’re all about you do a quick Google search, I’m sure 🙂  I can tell you though that these are the things I start with and it took me some time to figure these out as well as hours of restoring my VirtualBox to a checkpoint and restarting the process 🙂  I hope they help for you as well.

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo apt-get install build-essential

sudo apt-get install dkms gcc

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname –r)

sudo apt-get install ncurses-dev

sudo apt-get install zlibc zlib1g zlib1g-dev

sudo apt-get install curl

Git Requirements

To connect to any Source Control system running on Git, like GitHub for install, you’ll need to install Git.  Seeing that I’m using GitHub for my personal hosting as well as at work I’m adding it here.  To take this one step further, you’ll also need to install Git if you want to install RVM at a later stage.

sudo apt-get install git

Java Requirements

First thing you’ll need to do before you try and install the Java Runtime or the Java Development Kit, is to uncomment the canonical source in your “/etc/apt/sources.list”.  To do this in the simplest manner you can simply run the following command:

sudo sed -i “s/# deb http:\/\/archive.canonical.com\/ubuntu/deb http:\/\/archive.canonical.com\/ubuntu/” /etc/apt/sources.list

Now that you have them as a source, you can simply run the following command to install Java.

sudo apt-get -y install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-jdk

Ruby & Ruby Version Manager (RVM) Requirements

For certain Rubies and Ruby Gems to work properly, you need to install the following packages before you install either Ruby or RVM.  I don’t know why, but for some reason some of the Rubies and Ruby Gems have dependencies on these packages.  I’ve tried different combinations and not installing some of these, but ended up just doing it anyway.

sudo apt-get -y install unixodbc unixodbc-dev freetds-dev tdsodbc sqsh libxslt-dev libxml2-dev

sudo apt-get -y install bison openssl libreadline5 libreadline-dev libssl-dev

Conclusion

That should do it in a nutshell.  In my experience and after countless hours and much frustration in setting up environment only to bring them down again and starting from scratch, these are the requirements to run most environments successfully.  I hope this helped you as much as it does me.