Adding Memcached to a Rails 2.1 Application in Mac OSX 10.5

I just couldn't find anything explicit on the web about this, but it turns out to be really easy.

Libevent
Install libevent: http://www.monkey.org/~provos/libevent/

cd to libevent directory
Run: ./configure; sudo make; sudo make install;

Memcached
Install memcache: http://www.danga.com/memcached/download.bml

cd to memcached directory
Run: ./configure; sudo make; sudo make install;

I don't know if all the sudo's are required, but it failed do to permissions without it. I suspect it's just required on the 'make'.

The run memcache:

> memcache

It is started with defaults for the ip and port of 127.0.0.1:11211

In my environment.rb - I added

config.cache_store = :mem_cache_store, 'localhost', '127.0.0.1:11211'

Then - restarted my web app and started using Rails.cache.

To use it, in the controller do something like this:

@list_of_items = Rails.cache.fetch('list_of_items', :expires_in => 60*60 ) { Item.find(:all, :conditions => ['column = ?', @value]) }