“No route to host” error while trying to install RVM

In rare cases the gpg --keyserver can fail in the process of installing RVM on MacOS. Luckily, there is a command you can run to circumvent this problem. Try using this instead:

curl -sSL https://rvm.io/mpapis.asc | gpg --import -

You should see in the results something like this:

  gpg: Total amount processed: 1 
gpg: imported: 1

Which should mean that everything has worked as expected. Now try following all the remaining commands, starting with this:

\curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable

‘File not found: lib’ Error installing Rails Gem

I recently had a problem trying to install Rails 3 on my MacBook with a fresh OSX Snow Leopard:

sudo gem install rails
Password: {entered}
Successfully installed rails-3.0.7
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for rails-3.0.7...
File not found: lib

Turns out this is a somewhat common problem.  But it seems that the solution is easy, just manually reinstall RDoc. To do this run these 3 commands:

sudo gem install rdoc-data
sudo rdoc-data --install
sudo gem rdoc --all --overwrite

The last line in particular will re-generate all the documentation for your installed gems (including Rails) and can take a while, but you should be able to confirm the fix by reissuing the Rails gem install command:

sudo gem install rails

shows that rails now installs properly and says that it has installed both ri and RDoc documentation without issue.

Getting SSI to work in MAMP

It’s no secret that I adore my Mac, mostly because it just makes my life easier.  I enjoy the security of OSX, I love it’s responsiveness and I love that my operating system doesn’t punish me for installing applications and development stacks just to ‘play with them’.  A while ago, while looking for a stack that would let me quickly and effortlessly get Apache, MySQL and PHP5 working together without having to muss about with configs and the such, I discovered MAMP and frankly, I adored it instantly.  After a rather large download, it was effortless to install and running it was a cinch.  And better still, the server applications only run when you open the MAMP application and tell them to run, so that you dont loose vital system resources running services you dont need.

Additionally, my IDE of choice, NetBeans can integrate directly with MAMP, so that when you create (for sake of argument) a new PHP project and run it, it automatically puts the project files into the MAMP Apache directory (to be honest you do need to configure the path when you create the project, but its no big deal) making development painless and convenient.

But I did hit a snag recently when for a university assignment I was required to do a XHTML website using HTML Server Side Includes.  I was shocked when I ran my website and my SSI didnt work.

But there is a solution.

To make .shtml work, I deleted the comment-symbols ( # ) in the file http.conf (find it in /Applications/MAMP/conf/apache/ and at the time of writing was near lines 982:

# To parse .shtml files for server-side includes (SSI):
# (You will also need to add "Includes" to the "Options" directive.)
#
AddType text/html .shtml
AddOutputFilter INCLUDES .shtml