Ruby on Rails on OSX Revisited

 Programming  No Responses »
Jan 022017
 

I didn’t get very far with my foray into Ruby on Rails since my last post. It’s installed, but life has gotten in the way of my finding the time to get a new website going. I did experience setting up Ruby again though on my work laptop for a book club that we’re starting. We’re reading Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: A Pragmatic Guide to Learning Programming Languages. In getting ready to run Ruby (the first of the seven languages), I found this post, Install Rails 5.0 – macOs Sierra, which seemed pretty good and introduced me to Ruby version managers. nvm which I’ve been using to manage node versions apparently took its idea from rvm. I’ve also been looking at http://ruby-doc.com/docs/ProgrammingRuby/ which is outdated, but has some good basics for Ruby.

 Posted by on January 2, 2017 at 12:58 pm

First time with Ruby on Rails on OSX

 Programming  No Responses »
Mar 082016
 

I’m in the process of reviving another project in addition to the React Native project which admittedly has stalled a bit over the last few months. I blame basketball and soccer season.

After looking at the web setups that my hosting company supports and vowing not to go down the PHP road again, I’m trying to get setup with Ruby on Rails. This post has been a pretty good guide to getting up and running on a Mac. I did run into several things that article did not cover, so I thought I’d cover them here.

First off, what led me to that post was that I tried using the install of Ruby already installed on with OSX and immediately ran into permissions problems as described in this Stack Overflow post. Apparently, it’s not a good idea to use the system Ruby and you have to install a development copy. As I followed the steps in the GoRails post, I ran across a few more issues.

I really like Homebrew, but you do need to be sure to update it frequently and probably should run the update prior to any new install. I tried installing MySQL and hit a few issues as I did it. The first was because I didn’t keep homebrew up to date.

I ran

homebrew doctor

to reveal that I didn’t have permissions on /usr/local/bin for some reason. Once that was fixed and I got MySQL installed, I tried following the instructions that show at the end of the install. Unfortunately, those instructions assumed that a symbolic link had been created that did not exist. Luckily, the GoRails article included the step to first create the symbolic link and the setup went well after that.

My last issue was encountered while trying to create the database during the initial application setup in Rails. It turns out the version of MySQL installed via Homebrew is not compatible with the version of Rails that I installed while following the article. In addition to needing to supply the database credentials in the yaml file as specified in the setup, I had to give a specific version of MySQL in the gemfile:

gem 'mysql2', '0.3.20'

Once getting through that, I was able get the Rails welcome page.

 Posted by on March 8, 2016 at 9:01 pm

Getting Started with React Native

 Geek, Programming  No Responses »
Dec 122015
 

We’re using React at work for a current project. I thought I might start checking out React Native as a side project to get me working more in React and to see what I can get going on iOS.

The React Native Getting Started page is pretty good, but upon trying to run the AwesomeProject sample, I got errors related to watchman in the console the first time and then a subsequent error similar to

Error building DependencyGraph:
TypeError: Cannot read property 'root' of null

followed by a stack trace. The simulator then loaded with a red screen and another set of errors. I went to the React Native Troubleshooting page, but didn’t find my error there. After googling a bit, I found that

brew update && brew reinstall watchman

did the trick for me and got me running. I also got warnings about running with iOS 7.0 as the target. I don’t know if that was the default from the React starter or some other default, but I just set that to the latest (iOS 8.2).

The issue navigator in Xcode is also giving the following error, but I haven’t sorted that one out yet. It didn’t keep the project from running.

(null): Directory not found for option '-F/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneSimulator9.2.sdk/Developer/Library/Frameworks'

Stay tuned as I post my progress here with trying out React Native.

 Posted by on December 12, 2015 at 2:54 pm