Installing Rails on OS X
There are numerous sites showing how to install Rails on OS X. The problem is, most of them gloss over steps that they might think are too simple to explain, leaving newbies confused and discouraged. Because there are several ways to install Ruby on Rails on OS X, many of them take the simplest way, which may or may not work when you begin needing advanced libraries or features. I don’t trust the wiki at all. The idea of a wiki is great, but I have been wholly unimpressed with any information coming from the rubyonrails wiki. The info is often out of date and unusable, or they gloss over steps.
Option 1: The simplest (Locomotive/Webrick):
Download and install Locomotive. Follow along with the screencast and build your first app. This is a real good way to get started if you just want to give Ruby on Rails a try.
Option 2: One step up (Lighttpd/Rails):
A lot of people overcomplicate this install process. The best writeup I have seen for getting this set up correctly can be found here, via hivelogic. If you follow all of their steps exactly, you should have no problems. Continue with this section with this writeup from developer.apple.com.
Option 3: Probably one of the hardest ways (Darwinports/Apache/Rails/Fastcgi):
If you want to use a library like rb-zip, the only way I could get it to work was to install everything via darwinports. This isn’t the easiest process, but I have broken it down into exact steps. Follow them closely and you shouldn’t have any problems. I have put these steps into a separate article, which you can find here (PPC) or here (Intel).