A Virtual Machine for Ruby on Rails Application Development

Introduction

This project automates the setup of a development environment for general Ruby on Rails application development.

Inspired by the book "Deploying Rails" and fxn's rails-dev-box

Requirements

• VirtualBox

• Vagrant

How To Build The Virtual Machine

Building the virtual machine is this easy:

host $ git clone https://github.com/amaia/rails-starter-box.git
host $ git submodule init
host $ git submodule update
host $ cd rails-starter-box
host $ vagrant up

If the base box is not present that command fetches it first.

host $ vagrant ssh
Welcome to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.2.0-23-generic-pae i686)
...
vagrant@rails-starter-box:~$

Port 3000 in the host computer is forwarded to port 3000 in the virtual machine. Thus, applications running in the virtual machine can be accessed via localhost:3000 in the host computer.

What's In The Box

• Git

• SQLite3, MySQL, and Postgres

• RVM (with ruby 1.9.3 and 1.8.7 installed)

• Bundler, Rails and Rake gems for both rubies

Recommended Workflow

The recommended workflow is

• edit files in the host computer

• run within the virtual machine

Virtual Machine Management

When done just log out with and suspend the virtual machine

host $ vagrant suspend

then, resume to hack again

host $ vagrant resume

Run

host $ vagrant halt

to shutdown the virtual machine, and

host $ vagrant up

to boot it again.

You can find out the state of a virtual machine anytime by invoking

host $ vagrant status

Finally, to completely wipe the virtual machine from the disk destroying all its contents:

host $ vagrant destroy # DANGER: all is gone

Please check the Vagrant documentation for more information on Vagrant.