Installing Merb (today)

2008/09/27 17:54:21 +0000

UPDATE 2: Thing are moving very quickly in Merb land this week. The best reference is Timothy Bennett's summary so please go there if you are serious about trying out Merb in the few days that remain between now and 1.0. (I'll leave the rest of this post up as historical oddity.)

I've decided to smooth the way for future Merbists to use CouchDB. This means getting into the edgy-edgy Merb land inhabited only by the most intrepid Rubyists. Merb will be 1.0 soon, and I hope some of that project's maintainers take a look at my hoop-jumping, because they'd do well to make this all brain-dead. Or maybe they don't want the brain-dead to use their framework. :)

First let's get the latest versions of the source code. These are the incantations I provided. If you do them out of order, it could get icky.

UPDATE: this turned out not to work with edge, so I added lines to checkout the v0.9.7 tag. 




    	
  1. there are a few git repos we'll want to grab, let's keep them together

    mkdir merbzone

    cd merbzone

    2. 

	
  2. undocumented dependency - extlib

    git clone git://github.com/sam/extlib.git

    cd extlib

    rake install

    3. 

	
  3. the main merb source code

    cd ..

    git clone git://github.com/wycats/merb-core.git

    git checkout v0.9.7

    cd merb-core

    rake install

    4. 

	
  4. another dependency problem

    sudo gem install templater

    5. 

	
  5. merb-more has all the goodies that (optionally) make merb fun

    cd ..

    git clone git://github.com/wycats/merb-more.git

    cd merb-more

    git checkout v0.9.7

    rake install


OK now lets generate an application, and then I'll shove you into Merbunity's excellent and up-to-date tutorials, 


merb-gen app MyApp --testing-framework=rspec --template-engine=erb --orm=datamapper


So there you go, you have an app (I hope) and now you can learn to add junk to it the right way. My new mini-project is to get comfortable in the crazy Merb world, so I can start to use it as a basis for developing CouchDB-backed web apps. One step at a time...