It’s always the little things.<\/p>\n
After working through a complete install of rails on Mac OSX Tiger, following the excellent steps on this page<\/a>, and then creating a test application a la these directions<\/a>, I still couldn’t get my browser to recognize my application. Yes I would get the “Welcome Aboard” message when connecting to localhost:3000, but my application would either give a 404 or just timeout. So, I googled and newsgrouped, but to no avail. Saw plenty of references to similar errors, 500 errors, etc. but no clear suggestion of a resolution.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So, I regrouped and used this packaged installer<\/a>, which fixes the problems native to the OSX 10.4 install of ruby, and sets up the whole shebang all over again. Very nice way to go and if I had to do it again I’d just start here. Probably a completely separate install from the first one above tho, since the former instructions put everything in \/usr\/local. But I still couldn’t connect to my app. I imagined possible errors with FastCGI, so I followed these steps<\/a> too. Nada.<\/p>\n (Of course, there’s Apple’s Developer pages<\/a> which points to the first site I used but includes much more detail about application creation–but without Locomotive<\/a> fwiw. Interesting, but I just wanted it to work first. Nothing was pointing me in the right direction.)<\/p>\n Then, last night about 4AM I woke up and thought “web permissions…the server doesn’t have permissions to the directory on my desktop.” Now, I never<\/strong> would have made this mistake with a normal html\/cgi application, but new technology is always misleading somehow. I was working on my Desktop, instead of Library\/Webserver\/ like I shoulda been.<\/p>\n Now, Tony Arnold (the saviour who created the installer package I ended up using), has another page<\/a> where he mentions permissions, but I guess I was in a hurry. But I don’t think any<\/em><\/strong> of the other sites mentioned this tiny but critical detail. Maybe they thought it was too obvious. But I can imagine lots of beginners simply going home in frustration after getting nowhere, if only they would cd to the right dir.<\/p>\n Then again, I was also bamboozled on my linux box by another simple problem: I was trying to connect to lightpd instead of apache as recommended, but you need to stop httpd and then start lightpd since they can’t both use port 80. boing<\/em>.<\/p>\n Seems like it’s always 1% of the problem that causes 99% of the headache. It’s the little things.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s always the little things. After working through a complete install of rails on Mac OSX Tiger, following the excellent steps on this page, and then creating a test application a la these directions, I still couldn’t get my browser to recognize my application. Yes I would get the “Welcome Aboard” message when connecting to… Continue reading