Scott Motte

Beginner’s guide to installing merb

Merb is very cool, but one thing that bothers me is that it is still tough to simply get installed - even at 1.0. The guys working on merb are seriously awesome and amazing. Their progress might even be told in programming history books one day, but installing all the parts of merb has always been a bit painful.

Here’s what I did.

First your gonna need datamapper or the install from merb edge will send a hissy fit.

sudo gem install dm-core dm-more

(hopefully, this will soon just be datamapper - would make more sense)

Then merb:

sudo gem install merb --source http://edge.merbivore.com

Then merb-plugins

cd ~/sources
git clone git://github.com/wycats/merb-plugins.git 
cd merb-plugins
sudo rake install

(hopefully this will become a gem soon too)

You’re also gonna need webrat - even if you don’t end up using it.

sudo gem install webrat

You’re also going to have to create a test database once you setup an app. To do that first edit your database.yml file, then do the following to actually generate that database.

rake db:create MERB_ENV=test

Then run the migrations with:

rake db:automigrate MERB_ENV=test

(there used to be a db:test:clone rake task for this, but it seems to be no more as of this posting so you instead specify the MERB_ENV as the ‘test’ environment)

Now you’ll be able to run autotest