Installation

In most cases gem install smashing should allow you to use the smashing command to create your dashboards. Installing Ruby, other requirements, and the Smashing dependencies may vary depending on your operating system.

CentOS 7

Official docs are hard to come by.

• DigitalOcean publishes guides on Install Ruby on CentOS 7 but that one's using rbenv
• Install newer Ruby via RPM

Ubuntu 16.04

TODO: update to latest Ubuntu LTS

Use Brightbox-supplied packages, they have a Launchpad package repo page and everything.

See https://www.brightbox.com/docs/ruby/ubuntu/

When the smashing installation instantly fails due to being unable to located openssl, run 'apt install build-essential libssl-dev' - as per https://github.com/Smashing/smashing/issues/28#issuecomment-268635142

macos

TODO: help wanted to write this section

Windows

These instructions were tested on Windows 10 Pro, with Ruby 3.0.0 (stable at the time of writing). If you are having troubles installing Smashing on Windows, please get in contact in our chat for support. In case you have confirmed that you found a bug in Smashing, create an issue using the existing label "windows".

In case you prefer to use the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) it has been tested and confirmed to work with too.

• Use your preferred Ruby installation method; the tested version for this article was 3.0.0 with RubyInstaller
• Make sure you installed a compatible version of Ruby from this list: https://github.com/Smashing/smashing/blob/master/.travis.yml

After you have installed Smashing, you can create a dashboard with smashing new test && cd test. Then you will have to complete the following steps:

• Add "gem 'tzinfo-data'" to your project gemfile
• Add "ENV['TZ'] = 'Europe/Oslo'" on the very first line of config.ru. Use correct TZ database from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones

Now you should be able to start Smashing with smashing start, and access your dashboards visiting http://localhost:3030/ 🎉

Problems starting smashing due to thin/eventmachine

For a long time (over a year at the time of writing) Windows has had issues with eventmachine and thin gems. You may encounter an error message like rb:2:in require': cannot load such file -- 3.0/rubyeventmachine (LoadError)`

Unfortunately, at this time there is no known fix for that in the latest release of eventmachine. There are, however, workarounds:

• Redmine #30513 Unable to load the EventMachine C extension; windows
• oneclick/rubyinstaller2 #96 Unable to load the EventMachine C extension; To use the pure-ruby reactor, require 'em/pure_ruby'

It is assumed that at this point you have created a new dashboard, installed the gems required with bundle install, and tried to start the server.

That means you will have a Gemfile.lock with eventmachine for your environment. Since we want to install the Ruby platform version, first you must uninstall it with gem uninstall eventmachine. Remove other versions too if present.

Now you should be able to install it with gem install eventmachine --platform=ruby. Finally, edit your Gemfile.lock removing any platform specific information. For example, in the test environment used for this article, Gemfile.lock had eventmachine (1.2.7-x64-mingw32) and the solution was to replace it with eventmachine (1.2.7). Now it should use the right version we installed earlier with --platform=ruby without warnings.