Nu on Linux (debian based systems)

There's a lot of activity these days on the Nu project. Short the Nu project is for .Net what gems are for Ruby. In fact it uses gems. In my last post I talked about tooling and where I wish tooling would go in the future. Package management is definitely one of the tools that will help us in the future. If you want to read up on Nu Rob Reynolds has some good posts explaining what it is and how to use it. What I'm going to go through here is just what is needed to get it working on Linux. There are just some small tweaks that needs to be done for it to be working.

If you don't have Ruby on your system already you'll need it.

sudo apt-get install ruby-full build-essential

Next you'll need to get gems.

sudo apt-get install rubygems

Ok, then we have all dependencies required to get going. Now lets get Nu. Nu is installed through gems like this (NB! make sure you install nu with root priveleges or it won't work).

sudo gem install nu

Good, now we have all we need to start using Nu. Just one thing, when running Nu I got an error saying "no such file to load -- FileUtils". The reason for this is that Linux has a case sensitive file system and the file is called fileutils.rb not FileUtils.rb.  If you also end up having this issue go to the folder containing fileutils.rb (something like /usr/lib/ruby/1.8) and create a symlink by running the following command.

sudo ln fileutils.rb FileUtils.rb

Now to some real Nu action. Let's say we have a project and we want to start using NHibernate. What you have to do is to go to the root folder of your project and type this command.

nu install nhibernate

You'll get a couple of warnings but it's going to do what it's supposed to. When it's done you can go into the newly created lib directory and see NHibernate and it's dependencies in there. Neat huh!?