I recently started teaching myself Ruby on Rails. So far I’m enjoying the experience and find that Rails is living up to the hype as a fast and easy to use framework.

One pain point was getting Rails installed and configured on my local development machine. Although the process is relativity simple (when you know how) it is prone to error that can result in a lot of frustration (especially when you just want to start coding).

Below is a short five step process to installing and configuring Rails on OS X 10.10.

Step 01:

Install Xcode from the Mac AppStore. Xcode is an integrated development environment (IDE) containing a suite of software development tools developed by Apple. It’s fairly big and therefore can take some time to install.

Step 02:

Install Homebrew, which is an open source software package management system that simplifies the installation of software on OS X.

To install simply open “Terminal” and run the following command:

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"


You can ensure your installation is up to date by running brew doctor.

Step 03:

Install Ruby Version Manager (RVM) and Ruby.

Run the following terminal command:

\curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable


Once the RVM installation is complete, close and reopen terminal. Now run the following terminal command:

type rvm | head -n 1


To install Ruby, run the following terminal command:

rvm use ruby --install --default


This may take a few minutes.

Step 04:

Install Xcode Command Line Tools by running the following terminal command:

xcode-select --install


When prompted, click Install.

Step 05:

Install Rails by running the following terminal command:

gem install rails --no-ri --no-rdoc


That’s it! You should now be able to create a new rails app and access it via your localhost.

development programming ruby_on_rails ruby rails os_x macos