Racing on Rails has typical Ruby on Rails prerequisites. Rails, and all of the non-native gems, are already "vendored" in the git repository. If you are already developing with Ruby on Rails, you may already have them installed. Also consider all-in-one Rails installers for  Windows and  Mac OS X, Free BSD Ports, or Linux packages.

•  MySQL 4.1+ (MySQL 5.1 not recommended on Windows)
•  Ruby 1.8+
•  Ruby Gems
• MySQL gem (gem install mysql)
• Rake gem (gem install rake)
•  Rack (gem install rack)
•  Git (optional: for developemnt)
•  Capistrano (optional: for deployment)
•  Java (optional: for acceptance tests)

Racing on Rails is developed and tested on MySQL 5.1, but any modern version should work. In fact, it should run on any Rails-supported database with few changes. Racing on Rails uses UTF-8 throughout. I believe this should hold true even if your MySQL database defaults to latin1 encoding, but I haven't tested this assumption. All of our production and dev databases default to UTF-8.

Git is a source control tool useful for production deployments and working on Racing on Rails itself.

Capistrano is an automated Rails deployment tool. It's a good way to do handle your production deployments. If you install Capistrano, you'll want the its prerequisites as well. In addition, Racing on Rails' deployment scripts require additional gems:

• echoe
• mongrel_cluster

Platforms

Racing on Rails is primarily developed on OS X and deployed on FreeBSD. Most admin users use Safari. The public-facing pages work in IE 6, Firefox 2+, and Safari.

It should also run happily, all tests pass, and be accessible on Windows and Linux. A few exceptions:

• A  Rails issue breaks Selenium
• Drag-and-drop on the admin pages is flaky in IE
• The version 2.7.3 MySQL gem doesn't seem to work with MySQL 5.1