Important Information
About Rails Versions
Rails is an evolving framework. The core Rai ls developers are continually
making changes, adding new features, fixing bugs, and so on. Per iodically
they package up the latest version of Rails into a release. These releases are
then available to application developers as RubyGems.
This book is written for Rails 1.2.
As the book is going to press the core team have created the codebase for
Rails 1.2. However, they have not yet packaged it into a gem. This gives us a
bit of a problem. We want the book to reflect all the latest and greatest Rails
features, but we also know that it is hard for folks to jump through the hoops
required to get the so-called Edge version of Rails installed on their systems.
And until a gem is availab le, the 1.2 features are only available in Ed ge Rails.
Now, it may well be that by the time you get your hands on this book, the
Rails 1.2 gem is out. It’s easy to find out. After you’ve instal led Rai ls (as
described in Chapter
3, Installing Rails, on page 31), bring up a command
prompt and enter
rails -v. If it reports “Rail s 1.2” or later, y ou’re fi ne.
If instead you see something like “Rails 1.1.6,” you’ll need to updat e to get
the code in this book to run. We’ve prepared a snapshot of the Ra ils frame-
work code that we used when writing this book. You can install it in your
own Rails applications as a temporary measure until 1.2 is released.
• Create your application normally . You’ll find that it will contain a direc-
tory called vendor
• Download http://media.pragprog.com/titles/rails2/code/rails.zip into your
application’s
vendor directory and unzip it. It should crea t e a new direc-
tory called
rails
• In your applica t ion’s top-level directory, issu e the command
rake rails:update
Once Rails 1 .2 is relea sed , you can install it and remove the directory tree
vendor/rails from your applications.
The version of Rails from our web site is not an official release, and should
not b e used in production applicat ions.
Dave Thomas
Prepared exclusively for Leah Halperin
