I wanted to incorporate A/B testing into a Rails project of mine. Being that I'm a fan of Patrick McKenzie and his micropreneurial pursuits, I decided to go with A/Bingo, his Ruby on Rails A/B testing framework. However, since I'm still pretty much a rookie when it comes to Ruby and Rails, I had some issues with the installation. Here are my tips...

In step #1, Patrick gives the installation options. I tried the script/plugin install command first, which seemed to execute fine. But I couldn't figure out where the download got placed. So, I tried the git clone command, but, well, turns out I didn't have git installed. (Remember, I is a rookie.) I quickly figured out that git can be easily installed (on OS X) using the Git OS X Installer. It worked great. I tried the git clone command again and an abingo directory got created in my local directory. Lovely.

In step #2, Patrick says to execute the ruby script/generate abingo_migration command. I tried, but I kept getting "Couldn't find 'abingo_migration' generator". I figured that something was in the wrong place, but, me being a Rails novice, it took me a while to figure out. Do the following:

  1. Copy the contents of the abingo/lib directory to your Rails project's lib directory.
  2. Copy the abingo/generators directory to your Rails project's lib directory, too. (I figured this out by reading the usage/help for the script/generate command.

With regard to step #3, I must be using a different version of Rails (v2.3.3), because the names of the applicable files for me were application_controller.rb and application_helper.rb.

In the "Usage" -> "Statistical Significance" section, the command you want is experiment.describe_result_in_words, not experiment.describe_results_in_words.

Hope this helps anyone having similar issues.