BIOS: Enable virtualization in BIOS (VT-x) Software: VirtualBox: VirtualBox 4.3.18 or 5.0 Image: Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan Retail VirtualBox Image Winrar or 7zip. Install Mac OS X El Capitan on VirtualBox. First, download the VirtualBox for Windows from its website. Once you have downloaded the VirtualBox then install it on your computer. Homebrew allows us to install and compile software packages easily from source. Homebrew comes with a very simple install script. When it asks you to install XCode CommandLine Tools, say yes. Open Terminal and run the following command: ruby -e '$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)'.

Setting Up A Database

Rails ships with sqlite3 as the default database. Chances are you won't want to use it because it's stored as a simple file on disk. You'll probably want something more robust like MySQL or PostgreSQL.

There is a lot of documentation on both, so you can just pick one that seems like you'll be more comfortable with.

If you're new to Ruby on Rails or databases in general, I strongly recommend setting up PostgreSQL.

If you're coming from PHP, you may already be familiar with MySQL.

MySQL

You can install MySQL server and client from Homebrew:

Install Mac Os X 10.11 El Capitan

Once this command is finished, it gives you a couple commands to run. Follow the instructions and run them:

By default the mysql user is root with no password.

When you're finished, you can skip to the Final Steps.

PostgreSQL

You can install PostgreSQL server and client from Homebrew:

Once this command is finished, it gives you a couple commands to run. Follow the instructions and run them:

Install Mac Os X El Capitan

By default the postgresql user is your current OS X username with no password. For example, my OS X user is named chris so I can login to postgresql with that username.