Installing Rails

If you don't have an Internet connection or your company blocks some ports to downloads gems, you'll need to download each gem to your HDD first and then install them locally.

This procedure is explaines here, but in a short version, do the following:

1) Activesupport from: http://rubyforge.org/projects/activesupport/
2) ActionPack from http://rubyforge.org/projects/actionpack/
3) Actionmailer from http://rubyforge.org/projects/actionmailer/
4) Activerecord from http://rubyforge.org/projects/activerecord/
5) Activeresource from http://rubyforge.org/projects/activeresource/
6) Actionwebservice from http://rubyforge.org/projects/aws/
7) Rake from http://rubyforge.org/projects/rake/
8) Rails from http://rubyforge.org/projects/rails/

Then go to the directory where all this files are, and install them in the same order with:
c:\> gem install gemname

After installing rails you might probably install some other packages that I personally use a lot:
gem install mongrel
gem install postgres-pr

My First Rails Project

rails appname
createdb dbname -U postgres -O postgresadmin -E 'UTF8'
cd appname
script/plugin install http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/restful_authentication/
script/generate authenticated user sessions --include-activation
rake db:migrate

// edit in /app/controller/application.rb and add the very first line
include AuthenticatedSystem

// edit in /config/database.yml
adapter: postgresql
database: dbname
username: postgresadmin
password: postgresadmin
host: localhost
timeout: 5000

links:
restful_authentication with an excellent tutorial

if you want to have an easy backoffice, you can use the active_scaffold plugin:

git clone git://github.com/activescaffold/active_scaffold.git vendor/plugins/active_scaffold && rm -rf vendor/plugins/active_scaffold/.git

Use WebOrb for commmunication between Flex and Rails with:
ruby script/plugin install http://themidnightcoders.net:8089/svn/weborb

install http://themidnightcoders.net:8089/svn/weborb

if you want to send automatically generated mail on some action use

script/plugin install http://svn.douglasfshearer.com/rails/plugins/action_mailer_optional_tls

more explained on here and here