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

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 $ cd rails-starter-box
host $ git submodule init
host $ git submodule update
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.