Best guide to turn a PowerBook into a web server?

Question

I "inherited" a PowerBook and want a place to host some of my pet Rails apps.

What's the best step-by-step guide (or guides) to set this up? Feel free to write your own here, if you like, or write the steps with references.

Answer 1

Apple has a step-by-step for using Rails on their website:

http://developer.apple.com/tools/developonrailsleopard.html

Rails comes pre-installed on Leopard (if you're using that), but if you follow the instructions it will work on Tiger as well.

Answer 2

Not a guide, but I suggest installing Mac OS X, either Tiger (10.4) or Leopard (10.5). Both come with the Apache web server pre-installed. All you have to do is enable access to it through the sharing preferences pane.

To get you started, look here for a list of short videos on how to turn your Mac into a server (web, mail, ftp, vnc etc).

Answer 3

are you using 10.5 (Leopard)? if so, you already have rails, apache, mysql, etc. here's a guide for getting started (includes updating rails to the latest version)

• 10.5 (Leopard)

here's a guide for 10.4 (Tiger), although some of the versions are outdated, but the info is still useful.

• 10.4 (Tiger)