Over the past few weeks, I have managed to set up a pretty nice Ruby on Rails programming development environment. Before I started, I had little knowledge or experience with OSX Terminal, Ruby, Rails, or Apache server.

Apple’s got a great article about using Ruby on Rails for Web Development on a Mac. It includes a link to this article, which I used to get Ruby on Rails up and running.

Also, I personally use and recommend RadRails. It is an all in one Ruby on Rails software development environment that makes it easy to manage multiple test servers and projects. It is Java-based and should run on most platforms. It does everything I need and is free to use.

I tried to use RadRails on my Mac but for some reason cannot get the IDE to shut down a Webrick server instance once started without the whole environment crashing. I no longer use RadRails.

I now use TextMate and Lighttpd just as recommended in the Apple article, and it works quite nicely - just like the Rails videos..