I’m probably a bit late to the party with this article, but I’m a bit of a chicken so I thought I’d wait for the dust to settle a bit before installing Snow Leopard on the MacBook Pro I use for Ruby development.

Matt Aimonetti suggested on the official Rails blog that upgrading your Ruby development environment from Leopard will work fine, albeit with a fair bit of fiddling afterwards. Given that the upgrade isn’t completely seamless for Rubyists (and being the OCD sufferer that I am), I opted for a clean re-install of everything.

I’m not going to give a full set of instructions here, as that’s already been done elsewhere by people like Dan Benjamin and Mike Gunderloy. Here’s my checklist of tasks to get your Ruby environment up and running as quickly as possible.

Checklist

• Install Xcode from the Snow Leopard Disc.
• Install Textmate, or your text editor of choice. This is useful for editing environment files during the install process.
• Install MySQL using a pre-built 64-bit package (you probably want version 5.0 or 5.1).
• Install Swoon’s 64-bit SnowLeopard MySQL pref pane
• Compile Ruby, Gems and Rails.
• Download and install Macports version 1.8.0.
• Install any ports you need, such as ImageMagick, FreeImage
• Install the MySQL gem with
  

  sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

• Install any other gems you need (capistrano, passenger, mongrel, image_science, rmagick, RedCloth etc.)
• Compile Git.
• Sort out your github keys.
• Install the Snow Leopard Passenger pref pane.

Gotchas

Most things went pretty smoothly for me. The only real problem I had was that Snow Leopard doesn’t come with Java 1.4.2, which SecureTrading (Swirrl’s payment processor) requires for access to its API. Here’s how I installed this version of Java:

mkdir ~/src
cd ~/src
curl -O http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/isdal/snow_leopard_workaround/java.1....
tar -xvzf java.1.4.2-leopard.tar.gz
sudo mv 1.4.2 /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.4.2-leopard
cd /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/
sudo ln -s 1.4.2-leopard 1.4.2

Links

• Riding Rails – Upgrading to Snow Leopard
• Dan Benjamin’s instructions on HiveLogic
• Mike Gunderloy’s Definitive Snow Leopard Guide, and various Double Shot posts.
• Snow Leopard Java problems