Pi on rails

Ruby on Rails installation on Raspberry Pi is quite simple. Unfortunately on board we have only 512 MB RAM and slow CPU so that can complicate some things

Probably with that small memory we will can run 1 medium-small RoR application in one ruby version with one gemset.

Compiling ruby on Raspberry Pi is little time consuning task, so I would recommend use ruby available in distribution repository if that is possible. Also there installing rvm or other ruby version menagers for one application is unnecessary

If You would like to compile ruby from sources or use rvm You can also use tutorial from website eLinux

The Raspian way.

sudo apt-get install ruby

The Arch Linux way.

There is the newest ruby interpreter in Arch Linux for Raspberry pi repository so we can just run:

sudo pacman -S ruby

Any distro

To install gems without root authorization we can in very clever way override enviroment variable adding line to ~/.bashrc :

export GEM_HOME=$HOME/.gems

Some gems includes also commands like rake,rails To have possibility to use theese comands without typinch all paths we need to add gem’s bin path to enviroment variable PATH. Gem’s bin is in ~/.gem/ruby/(ruby version)/bin . In system we can have commands that have that same name like gems so we will add new path on the begginng export PATH=(new path):$PATH in file ~/.bashrc .

In My uscase it was:

export PATH=$HOME/.gem/ruby/2.1.0/bin:$PATH

Raspberry Pi not always have big SD card and to save some time on installing gem we can disable generate documentation for gems To turn of default document generation task we need to add line in ~/.gemrc (create if it doesn’t exist) :

gem: --no-document

Now just install rails gem

gem install rails

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