Brightbox maintain packages for Ubuntu Lucid and Hardy to make life easier for Rails users. These are obtainable from the Brightbox APT repository.
Brightboxes are already set up to use the APT repository by default, but they're publicly available for anyone running Ubuntu to use.
We provide extras such as Passenger/mod_rails, Ruby Enterprise and Sphinx. For Hardy, we also provide a few backported packages, such as Apache, NGINX and git. More details of the packages available are here.
If you're not on a Brightbox, this is how to use the repository. Import our apt repository key:
wget http://apt.brightbox.net/release.asc -O - | sudo apt-key add -
Then download the appropriate sources file:
sudo wget -c http://apt.brightbox.net/sources/lucid/brightbox.list -P /etc/apt/sources.list.d/
sudo wget -c http://apt.brightbox.net/sources/hardy/brightbox.list -P /etc/apt/sources.list.d/
Then install packages:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install sphinx-search
The testing repositories are where we put newer packages for people to test, unsurprisingly.
You shouldn't leave these repositories in your sources list and do blind upgrades as new packages might appear here that break things. (In particular, new Ruby packages might break any gems you have with native extensions).
Add our repository key as per the stable repository. Then download the appropriate testing repository sources file.
sudo wget -c http://apt.brightbox.net/sources/lucid/brightbox-testing.list -P /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ sudo wget -c http://apt.brightbox.net/sources/lucid/rubyee-testing.list -P /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ sudo wget -c http://apt.brightbox.net/sources/lucid/passenger-testing.list -P /etc/apt/sources.list.d/
sudo wget -c http://apt.brightbox.net/sources/hardy/brightbox-testing.list -P /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ sudo wget -c http://apt.brightbox.net/sources/hardy/rubyee-testing.list -P /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ sudo wget -c http://apt.brightbox.net/sources/hardy/passenger-testing.list -P /etc/apt/sources.list.d/