Ronald Bradford
MySQL Expert

MySQL Expert Ronald Bradford shares valuable input in MySQL Performance Tuning, MySQL Scalability and general MySQL Help from his two decades of working with MySQL, Oracle, Ingres and development technologies.

Getting started with Ruby and Sinatra

I’ve been doing a little work with Ruby, starting with some XHTML parsing with Nokogiri. I’ve just created my first web page using Sinatra.

While the instructions makes it look simple, it was a little more complex due a package dependency error.

Installation

$ sudo gem install sinatra
Password:
Successfully installed rack-1.2.1
Successfully installed sinatra-1.0
2 gems installed
Installing ri documentation for rack-1.2.1...
Installing ri documentation for sinatra-1.0...
Installing RDoc documentation for rack-1.2.1...
Installing RDoc documentation for sinatra-1.0...

Smoking it

Following the 5 line example on the home page, didn’t produce the result I expected.

 ruby rb42.rb
/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rack-1.2.1/lib/rack/utils.rb:138:in `union': can't convert Array into String (TypeError)
	from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rack-1.2.1/lib/rack/utils.rb:138
	from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `gem_original_require'
	from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `require'
	from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rack-1.2.1/lib/rack/request.rb:1
	from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `gem_original_require'
	from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `require'
	from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rack-1.2.1/lib/rack/showexceptions.rb:3
	from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `gem_original_require'
	 ... 7 levels...
	from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/sinatra-1.0/lib/sinatra.rb:4
	from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in `gem_original_require'
	from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in `require'
	from rb42.rb:2

Some Googling found a reference to a compatibility problem. While the syntax given on the post wasn’t correct, it was sufficient for me to find a correct solution.

$  sudo gem uninstall rack
Remove executables:
	rackup

in addition to the gem? [Yn]  y
Removing rackup

You have requested to uninstall the gem:
	rack-1.2.1
sinatra-1.0 depends on [rack (>= 1.0)]
If you remove this gems, one or more dependencies will not be met.
Continue with Uninstall? [Yn]  y
Successfully uninstalled rack-1.2.1

$ sudo gem install rack --version '1.2.0'
Successfully installed rack-1.2.0
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for rack-1.2.0...
Installing RDoc documentation for rack-1.2.0...

And now expected results starting then viewing http://localhost:4567/

$ ruby rb42.rb
== Sinatra/1.0 has taken the stage on 4567 for development with backup from Mongrel

Environment

$ sw_vers
ProductName:	Mac OS X
ProductVersion:	10.5.8
BuildVersion:	9L31a
$ ruby --version
ruby 1.8.6 (2009-06-08 patchlevel 369) [universal-darwin9.0]
$ gem --version
1.3.6

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2 Responses to “Getting started with Ruby and Sinatra”

  1. Nikunj Mehta says:

    This worked for me too on Mac OS X 10.6.4 with ruby 1.8.7

  2. Kimos says:

    Struggled with this for a while. Downgraded from rack 1.2.1 to 1.2.0 and like magic everything is working again. I must have updated by accident by doing a gems:install. Thanks for sharing.

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