Installation

Step One: Install Apache

All development and testing is done using the Apache 2.2.x series webserver on Linux, FreeBSD, and MacOS X, though you should be able to run it under earlir versions or other platforms. We’d love to hear about you experiences under other configurations, and patches for portability are of course always welcomed.

Step Two: Install Ruby

You probably already have Ruby installed, but in case you don’t, you’ll need the latest version in the 1.8.x series. We’re interested in running it under 1.9.x, but that hasn’t been tested at all yet.

Step Three: Install mod_ruby

The mod_ruby Apache module embeds a Ruby interpreter into Apache, much like mod_perl and mod_python do for their respective interpreters.

Arrow is tested with the latest version, which was 1.2.6 when this was written.

Step Four: Install Ruby Library Dependencies

These are the various ruby libraries you will need to install in addition to the standard distributed ones. If you install Arrow as a gem, these will be installed for you, but you can install them by hand, too.

Standard Library

Arrow also uses some standard libraries that are part of the standard library, but which some package maintainers may elect not to install with the main Ruby interpreter package. If you have problems, you may wish to ensure that these are installed.

Optional Libraries

Some of the developer tasks in the Rakefile and some plugins for the server require additional libraries:

Developer Tasks

Documentation Tasks

Plugin Dependencies

Installing the Arrow Libraries

Again, if you installed via RubyGems, you won’t need to do anything else.

If you’re installing from source, now that all of the dependencies are installed, just do:

  $ rake install

to install the Arrow libraries.

Next, you will probably want to configure the webserver.