Beast is the spiffing new forum software from those two terribly clever chaps Josh Goebel and Rick Olson. Rick is already responsible for a very useful Ruby on Rails plug-in called acts_as_versioned and the very promising Mephisto blogweight CMS while Josh has a Rails Wiki called ServerSideWiki under his belt plus the rather useful Pastie.
The aim of Beast is to be a small and straightforward Ruby on Rails forum in less than 500 lines of code. It's up to 432 at the moment but seems about ready to go.
So, first problem, to get Beast installed on my Windows laptop development machine.
Step 1. svn checkout http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/beast/trunk/
You'll probably use Tortoise of course, but you're going to need SVN in line mode shortly.
Step 2. Bring up one of those terribly old-fashioned looking command shells (Start -> Run -> cmd.exe) and go to your new beast folder. Then: rake freeze_edge (我这里是使用的是ruby 1.8.6，Rails 1.2.3，freeze_edge已经不被推荐使用，这里用rake rails:freeze:edge代替)
This is needed as Beast uses some of the features in the 'edge' version of Rails, i.e. the version that hasn't been formally released yet. The main thing it appears to use is the new RESTful routing, of which more some other time. This command will need svn to be in the path so you may need to append "C:\Program Files\Subversion\bin" to the end of the current path.
Step 3. gem install RedCloth
RedCloth is the Ruby implementation of Textile, a natty text format that can edited easily and translated to and from HTML.
Step 4: Set up the database. Grab 'database.example.yml' from the config folder and reformat it for whatever database you're planning to use. Beast seems to prefer SQLite 2, so I'm going to use that. So all I'm doing is renaming 'database.example.yml' to 'database.yml'.
If you don't already have SQLite there are two intermediate steps:
Step 4a: Download SQLite 2 from the SQLite download page and drop the exe, dll and def files in c:\ruby\bin. Instructions of a sort are on this HowtoUseSQLite page.
Step 4b: Install the ruby library for sqlite: gem install sqlite-ruby. Matt Griffith has made this feel a lot easier.（如果前面拷贝的是sqlite3文件，这里也要安装sqlite3-ruby。 gem install sqlite3-ruby）
Then, at last: rake db:schema:load
Step 5: ruby script/server
This will start WEBrick on port 3000 so you can now access Beast on http://localhost:3000/.
最后附上sqlite的图形化管理工具（SQLite Database browser ）：http://sourceforge.net/projects/sqlitebrowser/