Locomotive on Mac OS X
The Locomotive project on Mac OS X promises to deliver a fully self-contained, easy to install, dmg for installation of Rails on Mac OS X. What’s interesting is this piece:
Simultaneously run multiple versions of Rails, each of which may be configured with different libraries, gems, or web servers. Locomotive uses “Bundles”, each of which is a self-contained installation of Ruby, Rails, and all the necessary support software and libraries (as well as many useful optional tools!).
I think that’s great, especially if you need to run different projects under different environments - this makes it that much easier on the mac.
The enthusiasm from the Locomotive site is well-founded - it is easy to install (drag and drop like any other Mac App) and works out of the box without a problem. I was able to do a local svn co of a project and point Locomotive to it without a problem. One tip though: if you can’t get it to start out of the box and you aren’t doing a new rails project locally but instead are checking out an existing project from a repository somewhere then check your permissions. It could be that you don’t have the appropriate permissions on the project in question. That will save you 5-10 minutes of pulling out your hair.
Locomotive is a Universal Binary.