Installing Spree eCommerce

I'm looking to update a website that was written in a decent, but not great website creator application. I want to write it in Rails (yea!) because I had such great fun creating the Zepatter.com website. I mean, that took less than 12 hours from sitting down with the GIMP to getting the application installed on the hosting environment. And a huge chunk of that 12 hours was figuring out how to get the hosting environment configured correctly. hehe.

So, I'm looking for an eCommerce engine for Rails. Yes, I could create the whole shopping cart and payment gateway on my own because there are tons of tutorials and general advice. However, I suspect that if I could find a full-featured engine, then someone else will have thought of -- and solved -- problems that will take me time to recognize and address.

So I came across Spree eCommerce.

However, I haven't updated Rails on my system in a while and Spree requires Rails 2.3.2. So I start by doing a

sudo gem update rails

which gets me to Rails 2.3.4. However, Spree wants 2.3.2 ONLY. So I remove Rails 2.3.4 and install 2.3.2. Then I install Spree according to the instructions. Then I try to create my first Spree application with:

spree mystore

Unfortunately, I got this error:

/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:578:in `report_activate_error': RubyGem version error: hoe(1.5.3 not >= 1.8.0) (Gem::LoadError)

OK. No problem. Need to update hoe

~/src:sudo gem update hoe
Updating installed gems
Updating hoe
ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::InstallError)
hoe requires RubyGems version >= 1.3.1

OK. No problem. Need to update gem. After all,

~/src:gem --version
1.2.0

So I do the following:

~/src:sudo gem update --system
Updating RubyGems
Nothing to update

OK, this may be a problem. Referring to the rubygems documentation, one needs to do the following:

gem install rubygems-update
update_rubygems

However, this failed with:

~/src:sudo update_rubygems
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:578:in `report_activate_error': Could not find RubyGem session (>= 0) (Gem::LoadError)
 from /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:134:in `activate'
 from /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:158:in `activate'
 from /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:157:in `each'
 from /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:157:in `activate'
 from /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:49:in `gem'
 from /usr/local/bin/update_rubygems:18

Mark Howe has a helpful blog on the matter.

In the end, the trick was to uninstall the partly installed rubygems 1.3.5, install rubygems 1.3.4, then do the

update_rubygems

And all was well. I was able to update hoe and then successfully run

spree mystore