So, you have that new and shiny JRuby 1.1 and would like to try it out with rails. Here’s a quickest guide to do so! The guide assumes that you want to use MySQL as the database, and it has already been installed.

First, install the following gems:

• mongrel - simple but powerful web server.
• activerecord-jdbcmysql-adapter - all you need for activerecord on JRuby to talk to MySQL.
• rails - well, the Ruby on Rails proper.

The command line:

   1: jruby -S gem install mongrel activerecord-jdbcmysql-adapter rails

Create a sample rails application with MySQL backend:

   1: jruby -S rails myapp -d mysql

Enter the newly-created “myapp” directory, then modify the config/database.yml. First and foremost, you need to adjust the adapter name, and instead of ‘mysql’ you should specify ‘jdbcmysql’. You might also want to delete the lines starting with “socket:”.

Here’s a simple example for the development environment:

   1: development:

   2:   adapter: jdbcmysql

   3:   encoding: utf8

   4:   database: myapp_development

   5:   username: root

   6:   password:

Now, it’s time to create our database:

   1: jruby -S rake db:create:all

The next step is to create some minimal scaffolding so that you could actually play with some dynamic functionality and database access:

   1: jruby script/generate scaffold post title:string body:text published:boolean

We need to update the database after that:

   1: jruby -S rake db:migrate

And we’re basically done here, just start rails via:

   1: jruby script/server

and point your browser to the:

   1: http://localhost:3000/posts

Enjoy!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 8:44 pm and is filed under JRuby. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.