sudoless Rails

I'm working through chapter 1 of "The Ruby on Rails Tutorial" and I'm already blanching at the number of invocations of sudo that are present. I'm thinking to myself, "surely there must be a way to do this while globally installing as little software as possible?" After all,

sudo install is like using global variables to manage state.

— @trenton42, via
https://twitter.com/zigg/status/496002096085209088

Avoiding the global installation of software that's for a specific project is not just an obsession of mine; it's very good practice, too—after all, if you can confine your project's dependencies into a specific area and produce your environment with a few simple commands immediately after a git clone, so can anyone else who pulls down your code. Always erect that wall to avoid pulling in undeclared dependencies—it will do you good in the long run.

With that in mind, here we go:

Install Bundler

Okay, one thing is outside our project directory: Bundler. But that's a system tool, and while it's also a Rails project dependency, it doesn't rise to the level of a web framework. We'll be using it similarly to virtualenv on Python, which I also never hesitate to install globally because it's the same software every project needs.

$ brew install brew-gem
$ brew gem bundler

Pro tip/shameless plug: Use brewdo! Then you'll be sandboxing your Homebrew-invoked software installations as well.

Create the project directory

$ mkdir first_app
$ cd first_app
$ vim Gemfile

For the Gemfile contents, consult figure 1.5 in the tutorial. Obviously, as I learn what the heck I'm doing with Rails, I expect to know what goes here for my own projects, but I imagine at a minimum it specifies something like

source 'https://rubygems.org'
ruby '2.0.0'
#ruby-gemset=railstutorial_rails_4_0

gem 'rails', '4.0.8'

Install and rails new

$ bundle install --path vendor/bundle
$ bundle exec rails new .

When prompted, don't overwrite your Gemfile.

$ bundle exec rails server

And viola! I got through the entire chapter, including the Heroku deploy, with this. I'll come back and update if I find later that I've made a horrible mistake. Of course, if you need to manage Ruby versions as well (I'm using the system Ruby 2.0.0 on OS X Mavericks), you'll need some solution for that—RVM, rbenv, chruby, something. I'm not yet qualified to give a recommendation there, but stay tuned, maybe?