A Virtual Machine for Ruby on Rails Web Development

Introduction

This repo is branched from the Rails Core development box (https://github.com/rails/rails-dev-box). This project automates the setup of a development environment for working with Ruby on Rails. Use this virtual machine to create websites and such.

Requirements

VirtualBox
Vagrant 1.1+ (not a Ruby gem)

How To Build The Virtual Machine

Building the virtual machine is this easy:

host $ git clone https://github.com/slacker2/dev-in-rails-box.git
host $ cd dev-in-rails-box
host $ vagrant up

That's it.

If the base box is not present that command fetches it first. The setup itself can take a little while (maybe 30 minutes?). After the installation has finished, you can access the virtual machine with

host $ vagrant ssh
Welcome to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.2.0-23-generic-pae i686)
...
vagrant@dev-in-rails-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

Vim (My preference. You should probably modify the puppet conf with your editor of choice)
Git
RVM
Ruby 2.1.0 (binary RVM install)
Bundler
Rails
SQLite3, MySQL, and Postgres
System dependencies for nokogiri, sqlite3, mysql, mysql2, and pg
Databases and users for a generic setup (you should probably change this?)
Node.js for the asset pipeline

Recommended Workflow

The recommended workflow is

edit in the host computer and
test within the virtual machine.

Just clone your Rails project into the dev-in-rails-box directory on the host computer:

host $ ls
README.md   Vagrantfile puppet
host $ git clone git@github.com:<your username>/<your project>.git

Vagrant mounts that directory as /vagrant within the virtual machine:

vagrant@dev-in-rails-box:~$ ls /vagrant
puppet  <your project>  README.md  Vagrantfile

Install gem dependencies in there:

vagrant@dev-in-rails-box:~$ cd /vagrant/<your project>
vagrant@dev-in-rails-box:/vagrant/<your project>$ bundle

We are ready to go to edit in the host, and test in the virtual machine.

This workflow is convenient because in the host computer you normally have your editor of choice fine-tuned, Git configured, and SSH keys in place.

Virtual Machine Management

When done just log out with ^D 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.

slacker2 / dev-in-rails-box