Best practice of installing Ruby and Rails on Snow Leopard?

Question

I am setting up a new Macbook as a rails development machine. Till now, I always installed ruby, MySQL, etc. through MacPorts, because I don't want to be dependent on the system version of ruby. But with stuff like Homebrew and rvm (no link because of spam prevention) popping up, is there a better recommended way of setting up ruby for rails development on OS X?

Answer 1

I don't know about best practice, but Dan Benjamin's instructions over at Hivelogic worked great for me on Snow Leopard:

• Installing Ruby, RubyGems and Rails on Snow Leopard
• Installing MySQL on Snow Leopard

—These instructions compile everything from source and install to /usr/local

Answer 2

Just run

gem update rails

and you'll get Rails on Snow Leopard. More info: http://rubyonrails.org/download

MySQL you should also not install from ports. I've got problems with it in Snow Leopard due to 32 vs 64 bit issues. I've installed the package provided at http://mysql.com and then I installed the mysql gem.