MacOS X installation

If you're using a Mac, you're lucky; it's pretty easy to get up and running with Ruby, Rails and MySQL.

Apache and MySQL

Apache is already installed, so there's very little to do to activate it. Simply fire up System Preferences > Sharing and click the checkbox beside 'Personal web sharing'. This will start up Apache for you, and you can stop it again by pressing the Stop button on that page.

Marc Liyanage has a very easy to install package for MySQL and very clear instructions to get it up and running. I would also recommend using CocoaMySQL to administer your databases. It provides a friendly GUI face for the database.

Installing Ruby and Rails

Rather than duplicating excellent work, I'll just point you in the direction of Hivelogic which has an excellent guide for building Ruby 1.8.2x, Rails, FCGI and so on. There are also instructions there for configuring Apache to use FCGI and to use Virtual Hosts.

Taking the easy way out

If you want a really easy life, follow this tutorial by Jacken, which walks you through using Locomotive (a one-click installation of Ruby, Rails and MySQL) to install and run Tracks.

Tiger

If you have Tiger, you'll find that Ruby 1.8.2 and SQLite3 is already installed. However, there's a small problem with installing gems, which you can fix by following the instructions here. I really recommend using SQLite3 as the database on Tiger. It's much simpler than having to install MySQL, and perfectly adequate for a personal tool.

Once you've got that lot set up, you can create an SQLite3 database and import the tables from the provided schema files:

Let's say that your tracks installation is in ~/Sites/tracks:

cd ~/Sites/tracks/db
sqlite3 my_tracks.db

This will put you in to the SQLite3 command line. Then, replacing [version-number] with the version number of the files you are using from tracks/db,

.read tracks_[version-number]_sqlite.sql
.read tracks_[version-number]_content.sql (this is optional)
.quit

If you want to start up Tracks when you login or boot the computer, take a look at the instructions and files here

Installing Tracks

From here, you just need to follow the installation instructions in source:/trunk/tracks/doc/README_FOR_APP#latest