Always on the look out for ways to improve productivity, I have looked a bit into Ruby on Rails as a development framework. I have watched numerous tutorials on how easy and fast you can deploy apps. Heck, I even bought a book to help me get "Up and Running". I have downloaded a couple IDEs and text editors that I hear can speed things up. Everything looks rosy except for one missing detail... I can not figure out for the life of me how to set up a server. Other than the tutorial on rubyonrails.org (which states "These instructions need to be updated.") and the instructions at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RubyOnRails (which also don't work for me), I can find no ways to successfully make my LAMP Box accommodate ruby (and I have worked through many others).

I get that I can just use web brick on port 3000 on my dev machine. But this is less than adiquate for when I actually want to release into the wild. I have also seen many options to lease ruby centric hosting. I am only comfortable with as-a-service when I know I can serve myself if need be. It seems as though I need to pick between my apache environment or one of the ror server setups, as I could serve up a ror app or my php apps but not both under the same configuration. Of course, in addition to new ror projects I would need to support legacy php projects.

I am a defeated man. I fail to see efficiency benefits as I spent such a large amount of time tinkering with my server set up to no avail. So much for getting things done.