That was nightmarish!

All I wanted was SQLite working with Rails. That’s all. And it was quick and easy – on my Ubuntu workstation at home, that is. And then, began 2 hours of gruesome agony – as I tried desperately to get the damn thing to work on my RHEL staging box.

I only have shell access to this machine – so no fancy graphical package manager. If I had a package manager, I would have selected libsqlite0-dev (the missing item) as well as libsqlite3-dev just to be safe, and would have saved myself the afore-mentioned two hour hair-pulling.

Here are the steps to get SQLite working with Rails –

* Download sqlite from http://www.sqlite.org/download.html. Compile and install the usual way. Or just get the compiled versions.
* Install libsqlite-dev (both libsqlite-dev3 AND libsqlite-dev0-> AAARGH!)
* Download, compile and install swig -> http://www.swig.org/download.html
* Install the sqlite3-ruby gem
* Downlad ruby-dbi and follow instructions on http://ruby-dbi.rubyforge.org/

Everything should work now! I tested this with Typo 4.0.3 and it works. Phew!