How to Set up a Ruby Local Development Environment

If you are on a Mac or a Linux machine, you probably already have Ruby installed. You can check by typing this at the command line:

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ruby -v
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ruby 1.9.3p194 (2012-04-20 revision 35410) [x86_64-darwin10.8.0]

If you get any output back other than ruby: command not found, you've got Ruby installed. If you don't, follow these instructions to install Ruby for Mac or Linux.

If you're using Windows, download the RubyInstaller package, which contains a complete Ruby environment.

Third-party dependencies in Ruby are managed with RubyGems, a command line tool that makes it very easy to add new libraries and include them in your Ruby projects. You can check if you have RubyGems installed already by running this at the command line:

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gem --version
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1.8.24

If you get gem: command not found, you can download RubyGems from their downloads page.

RubyGems for Windows will be installed by RubyInstaller.

Once you have RubyGems installed, installing Sinatra and twilio-ruby is a snap. Just type this at the command line:

gem install sinatra twilio-ruby

RubyGems will take care of the rest of the work.

Let's try our installed tools out with a short test file. Create a new file called test.rb and add the following code:

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require 'rubygems'
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require 'twilio-ruby'
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require 'sinatra'
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get '/' do
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  'Hello World! Currently running version ' + Twilio::VERSION + \
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    ' of the twilio-ruby library.'
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end

Now start up a local web server by running your test.rb file at the command line:

ruby test.rb

You should see output like this:

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Sinatra/1.3.2 has taken the stage on 4567 for development with backup from Thin
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>> Thin web server (v1.4.1 codename Chrome)
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>> Maximum connections set to 1024
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>> Listening on 0.0.0.0:4567, CTRL+C to stop

Now load http://localhost:4567 in a browser. You should see a "Hello World" message, with the version of the twilio-ruby library posted too.

If you received an error along the way, contact our support team with a description of what you were trying to do, what you expected to see, and what happened. They'll be glad to help you figure out what's going on.

Now that you've got your local environment set up, you're ready to dive into the Quickstarts. Have fun!