Linux

In this section we will cover the steps required to setup your development environment on Ubuntu 14.04

If you haven't already, grab a copy of Ubuntu 14.04 here and install it on your computer.

Installing Ruby

First thing we want to do is make sure our system has the latest updates and security patches. We will also install some dependencies for Ruby.

$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y
$ sudo apt-get install git-core curl zlib1g-dev build-essential libssl-dev libreadline-dev libyaml-dev libsqlite3-dev sqlite3 libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev python-software-properties libffi-dev libgdbm-dev libncurses5-dev automake libtool bison libffi-dev

Next we are going to install Ruby Version Manager (RVM). RVM will allow us to install and manage multiple versions of Ruby in our environment. We first have to download the author's public key to ensure we're downloading the correct packages.

$ gpg --keyserver hkp://keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 409B6B1796C275462A1703113804BB82D39DC0E3

If for some reason the above command fails try the following:

$ command curl -sSL https://rvm.io/mpapis.asc | gpg --import -

We can now install RVM on our system.

$ \curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash
$ source ~/.rvm/scripts/rvm

Now that we have RVM installed, let's install ruby.

$ rvm install 2.2.3
$ rvm use 2.2.3 --default
$ ruby -v

Now we need to tell Rubygems to skip documentation while installing packages (gems) locally.

$ echo 'gem: --no-ri --no-rdoc' > ~/.gemrc

Lastly we need to install bundler

$ gem install bundler

Git configuration

Git is a version control system we will be using throughout the course.

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:git-core/ppa
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install git-core

Next, let's tell git who we are.

$ git config --global user.name "you name"
$ git config --global user.email "[e-mail]"

Atom

At the beginning of the course (week 1 - 6) we'll be using a text editor to write code. There are many editors out there we can use. Sublime is one, TextMate is another, but our editor of choice for this course is Atom. It is brought to us by the good people of GitHub and comes with over 3000 extension packages - all open sourced.

"Atom is a text editor that's modern, approachable, yet hackable to the core — a tool you can customize to do anything but also use productively without ever touching a config file." - https://atom.io

Download and install Atom by following the instructions on their web site. Once you are done you can browse around for some packages you might find useful. Or you wait with that until you actually know what 'useful' is in the context of coding. If you want to find out more about how to install Atom packages head over to the excellent documentation site. Also, read through this blog post about some Atom extensions that might prove useful: http://www.sitepoint.com/10-essential-atom-add-ons/

For now, what you really want to do is to set Atom as the default editor fir Git (trust me, you'll going to need it):

$ git config --global core.editor "atom --wait"

Wrap

This should do for now. We will install the rest of packages we need as we progress through the course.