Setup Web Development Environment

Here’s a full guide of configuring development environment mostly for front-end development.

System Environment

Linux: Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS

Install Git

Installing Git is pretty much simple as follows:

$ apt-get install git

Install Node.js

Since we are using Linux, it’s better to install Node.js via package manager than using the source code.

The current version in Ubuntu repository is 4 at the time this article is written but we are going to use version 6 according to the official document:

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_6.x | sudo -E bash -

and then

sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

Optional: install build tools

To compile and install native addons from npm you may also need to install build tools.

Note: Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS already has build-essential package loaded. If you find it’s missing on your system, install as follows:

sudo apt-get install -y build-essential

You can then verify if nodejs and npm are installed by running:

$ node -v

and

$ npm -v

Install Ruby on Rails

Install Ruby

There are several ways of installing Ruby. On Linux, we can either use the package management system of your distribution or third-party tools, like rbenv and RVM.

Here we will include both ways of doing it.

Use Package Management System

Install dependencies for Ruby

$ sudo apt-get install ruby-dev zlib1g-dev

Run following command to install ruby from the repository:

$ sudo apt-get install ruby

You can verify the Ruby version when finished:

$ ruby -v

Use rbenv

Installing rbenv is more complicated than grabbing it from the repository, but in this way, you can keep different Ruby versions on your system and use a certain version for a specific project.

Install dependencies for Ruby

$ sudo apt-get update
$ 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

Install rbenv

$ git clone https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv
$ echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
$ echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.profile
$ echo 'eval "$(rbenv init -)"' >> ~/.bashrc
$ echo 'eval "$(rbenv init -)"' >> ~/.profile
$ exec $SHELL

$ git clone https://github.com/rbenv/ruby-build.git ~/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build
$ echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
$ echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.profile
$ exec $SHELL

Install Ruby

At the time this article is written, the latest Ruby version is 2.3.1, so we need to tell rbenv which version to install:

$ rbenv install 2.3.1

set up the current ruby version as default

$ rbenv global 2.3.1

And that’s it!

Install Bundler

Bundler is a tool to manage gems and versions for Ruby projects.

To install, simply run following command:

$ sudo gem install bundler

You can check Bundler version by running:

$ bundler -v

Install Rails

Rails is an MVC framework that capable of building full-stack projects.

Run following command:

$ sudo gem install rails

Check version information by running:

$ rails -v

Jul 27, 2016