I've taken over a rails site, and learning along the way.
It's been a real pain getting the site pulled down from git and working properly in OSX (mysql, REE, ruby_inline gem etc). It seems can be a little fiddly to get some of this stuff working cross os.
Our live production runs on ubuntu.
I have been developing on a cloud hosted server using vi / git etc and it's working quiet well, but it's a little slower (not much) to refresh pages etc and test.
I'm curious, is anyone developing in the cloud? Or do you run a local linux VM. Curious to hear about thoughts and experiences from the battlefield.
Many thanks,
b
It's a "default" environment when you have OS X on local and Linux on production servers. Many of rails-developers use it for everyday development and testing process.
You told "It's been a real pain getting the site pulled down from git and working properly in OSX", just ask a question here what exactly had a pain to setup? Ruby? Rails? Git?
No, it's almost the same platform, OS X is a BSD-based system.
Homebrew will help you to setup DB engine, GIT
RBEnv - multiple Ruby version handle
Rubygems - crossplatform GEM packaging
"I have been developing on a cloud hosted server using vi" - what does it mean? It's actually not a pattern of development process. What if you broke something straight on production server while business users are doing a demonstration to clients?
"I'm curious, is anyone developing in the cloud" - rather no, than yes. You can develop anywhere, but the code snapshot should be available to test and preproduction usage.
If we are talking about standard approach and typical task, it already has typical patterns and solution to achieve the goals
I think you will find most people develop on osx, some on linux, but by far the normal way to do it is locally rather then on a remote server
Related
I'm starting to learn Ruby on Rails and after a week I still cannot get the installation right. I've since moved to a cloud bases system, but it is extremely slow and rather a waste of time.
I do have a website and saw there's Ruby on Rails. Is it perhaps possible to set it up in a domain or sub domain and start and start learning/programming that way?
Any other alternatives is also welcome. I do now own a mac or Ubuntu, which makes it a little difficult.
Looking forward to your responses. In the meantime I'm installing/uninstalling and trying to see if I can somehow make it work on Windows.
Doing RoR development on Windows is a pain. I would suggest just uninstalling Windows and going for some Linux distribution if you are serious about learning RoR. Linux is free software so the only thing holding you back from having it on your computer is your self.
Developing with Ruby on Rails is say'd to be really easy for beginners but I would disagree with it. Developing on this framework requires you to actually understand the whole stack. The server, backend, client, database and ofcourse a new weird language called Ruby. Now most of this stuff is learnable and doable on every OS. But once you start messing with more advanced databases and servers, you will need some GNU utils from Linux.
For instance if you have made your first deployment to some external server, you will often need to know what is going on in there. The only way to do this is usually by going in that server with SSH and reading the logs. But doing that is difficult without a nice GUI. So now you have to learn some stuff like the tail and grep commands and Linux piping to find your info easily.
Also if the computer you use is not completely yours and you cannot do it on it, then try installing a virtual machine software like Virtual box.
With that you can install Ruby on a Linux that sits on your VM and use it like that. It will still be a bit slower but if your computer has decent hardware in it, you will still be happy with it.
Here is a guide on how you could do it: Guide for VM development
I've been doing front end web work for a while. I maintain several company websites and etc, mostly on Joomla. I'm getting bored with it and I really want to expand in to development. I have a few web app ideas for the company and some personal stuff I'd like to do.
Ive decided I want to learn Ruby and Rails and have been pursuing it for about a month now. I read a lot of tutorials and work through stuff I find online. I'm also diving in to git and trying to use it more.
I feel like Windows is not going to be conducive to me getting efficient at this. I know that you can, and some do, develop in Windows but I'm wondering if its time for me to move past it.
I picked Ruby to be my first real programming language because of the simplicity I read about. For both Ruby and RoR and I want to be able to learn a language that will let me build apps and web apps that are cross platform.
On to the problem, I can't immerse myself completely in a linux world. I have to have photoshop and indesign for part of my job. So I'm thinking maybe I should just do a live usb key install and take it back and forth between work and home. Is that a better solution than dual booting for what I want to do? I also realize that a mac would give me the best of both worlds, but I am budget constrained and I can't make that leap yet.
Also, is there a good place to hang out to learn more? I have paid codeschool and tutsplus accounts. Should I be back on IRC? What do you think? I'm looking for guidance more than anything I guess. I feel kind of lost on where to go how to not waste time and start developing real skills. Thanks.
You should also checkout the vagrant project which creates headless (non-gui) VMs and makes it easier to work with your files, etc in Windows while the code actually gets run on the Vagrant VM. Also, since its headless, the graphical UI isn't eating up resources and has less impact on your host machine.
Check out these resources:
http://www.vagrantup.com/
http://blog.dcxn.com/2013/07/12/introduction-to-vagrant-for-rails-developers/
http://railscasts.com/episodes/292-virtual-machines-with-vagrant
*Also if you're learning Rails, you MUST checkout Railscasts http://railscasts.com/
The last thing I knew about this is that:
In Linux you can use RVM which handles pretty well everything about your Ruby environment. In Windows I tried pik, but it does not have support to install newer Rubies.
Also, Linux console is much friendlier than Windows one, regarding appearance and functionality. I have explored console2 for Windows, but it did not feel so comfortable that time.
In Linux you have plugins like oh-my-zsh which allows you to speed up your development. But maybe there are kind of this plugin for Windows.
Other than those, I don't know why you should choose Linux VM.
I've developed a Rails app under Windows, and it turned out to be a huge mistake. Near the end of the development, I had to make my webapp multithreaded. The default Rails server does not allow multithreading, and all the alternative servers are either Linux-only, or I couldn't get them to work.
I also considered using JRuby(because Java threads), but by then my app was too big to convert to JRuby(there are some syntax differences that I couldn't track, and I relayed on some gems that don't work on JRuby). However, if you go for JRuby from the beginning, you might be able to pull it off.
I have a simple rails app that I need to deploy on a Window Server 2008 R2 server. I have looked around but have not found much on the topic. What are some simple / best ways of accomplishing this? Thanks!
I'm not sure if you can use Capistrano to deploy on windows. Otherwise you may want to have a look at kwatee (self-promotion). I haven't looked at deploying Rails app yet since Capistrano is the tool of choice there but kwatee is a free tool that can deploy pretty much anything from stand-alone applications, web applications on any platform, including windows.
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I am currently trying to set up a development environment for learning Ruby. The environment will primarily be for getting to grips with the language, but I will most probably move on to development with Rails after long. With web development a target, I would like to hear about preferred web servers and databases.
I plan on setting up the environment on a virtual machine, so I'm not worried about trashing the thing. Therefore, I am open to using a Linux distribution, OSX or Windows as the operating system.
I'm moving from C#, so I'd like to be forced into the Ruby way of thinking to a certain extent. Obviously, that's easier said than done.
What OS do most Ruby developers use?
What is the easiest IDE to get to
grips with coming from a background
of using Visual Studio?
Which
database is used most within the Ruby
community?
Which database is most
likely to be supported by most web
hosts?
Which web server is the
easiest to configure? To get up and
running in the shortest amount of
time.
Hopefully I have provided all the information needed and hopefully this will aid others in setting up their own environments.
Thanks
Edit:
Thanks guys. Some really good
suggestions so far, all of which I'll
take on board. I'm currently wading
through the copious articles surrounding
initial RoR setup on Linux, as I like to
understand how things work and are
tied together. Also, because it's all
free...
I'm currently putting together a
virtual machine (so I can break stuff)
using:
Ubuntu
SQLite
No webserver, I plan on using whatever development server comes with Rails out of the box, initially
Redcar Editor
Edit 2
I have setup a couple of environments
now.
I have the ubuntu setup running in a
Virtual Machine on Windows and decided
to try decking my Mac out for ruby
development too.
Overall, I'd have to say setup for the
mac was a lot less painful than the
linux setup. On the mac I'm running
with:
SQLite that comes with OSX out of the box(!)
TextMate (trial version, but loving it)
Mongrel web server
I've progressed from learning the ways
of Ruby to writing some simple
websites with Rails and am finding
development with Rails really simple
to use. I have also set up a GIT
repository on my working directory and
am currently trying out Heroku.
Thanks for the help, everyone.
If anyone would like any more information about setting up on either environment, I'd be happy to provide more detail.
What OS do most Ruby developers use?
Mac OS for most, but any Linux distro will do (Ubuntu/Fedora etc).
What is the easiest IDE to get to grips with coming from a background of using Visual Studio?
Textmate is quite popular if you're on Mac. Netbeans and Aptana are there if you need something similar to enterprise world. Emacs/Vim is ok too.
Which database is used most within the Ruby community?
So far most Ruby / RoR guys I know use open source databases. sqlite for local development while Mysql or Postgresql for production. My advice, sqlite is easy to learn, while give a try with Mysql or Postgresql, you might not know when your clients going to ask you to develop on them. Mysql is very popular. Postgresql I think has lot more features (personal preference).
Which database is most likely to be supported by most web hosts?
Mysql is most supported by shared hosting hence the M in LAMP (Linux/Apache/Mysql/Php). But Postgresql is getting more support too. Some hosting companies even support both but Rails developers usually prefer to use VPS (slicehost.com/linode.com) and manage all these themselves. Checkout heroku.com too for deploying your Rails app without needing much knowledge in sys admin stuffs.
Which web server is the easiest to configure? To get up and running in the shortest amount of time.
Developing with Rails you'll get webrick as a development server where you can test ur app locally. But for production I prefer modrails.com where you can choose between apache/nginx. I prefer to use apache since that is what I'm used to.
You'll want to look at RVM from the start, this takes away a lot of the pain of managing Ruby versions and gems.
Judging from the laptops I saw at Railsconf last June, Rails developers are about 90% OSX, 9.9% Linux, and there's like 1 or 2 guys on Windows.
Personally I use Textmate when I'm at home on OSX and gedit and redcar when I'm at work on Ubuntu Linux. I use sqlite for development mainly with mysql in production, but mongodb seems to be the new hotness, but I haven't done much more than some sample apps with it so I can learn it.
Virtual hosting providers will probably give you a choice of whatever database you want. Heroku is awesome and is used for deploying Rails applications via git, and uses postgres but has plugins to use mongodb if you want to go that way.
For what the community at large is doing, check out Thoughbot's survey results at: http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/308239139/2009-ruby-survey-results
You might have a look at the Bitnami installer, which claims to create a full Ruby/Rails stack. There's also a VM version, so in theory you could just grab their VM and start coding your app. (YMMV -- personally I haven't tried it).
OS
Most ruby developers seem to gravitate towards Macs for some reason, with a few linux and some windows devs. That said, I use windows for all my ruby work and haven't really run into any huge roadblocks. Your safest option will probably be a Mac, if you want to be on the same side as most of the community.
IDE
You don't really need a full-blown IDE for ruby, as you would for something like C#. Most mac users seem to use textmate. I personally use redcar. It's not fully completed yet, but it can be used on Windows, Linux or Mac, and I've yet to run into a feature I need that isn't provided. It is written in ruby, can be extended through plugins, and supports textmate themes and snippets. To supplement redcar, I've actually written a shell in ruby for my own use. It's still in alpha stage, but I've got features like grep and ls working, and capabilities for working with and manipulating files. You can extend it with ruby, and actually use any ruby command inside the shell. It's hosted here, and is currently for use on windows. After I get some more features in, I might start looking at Mac or Linux ports.
Database
Open source options like sqlite and mysql are used widely. I don't have enough experience on them to really comment on the differences. For what it's worth, Heroku (which is great for hosting) uses Postgresql.
Server
You should use a lightweight server like Thin for development, to test your app. For production, have a look at modrails.com (as a few other answers have suggested).
Good luck with whatever you choose.
OS
80-20 Mac-Linux. I've seen one Windows ruby dev so far. If you use and debian (ubuntu is a debian), take a look at rvm, because debian cripples rubygems.
IDE
You can code ruby without an IDE, grab an editor of your choice. We've got emacs, vim, textmate, gedit here. If you really want an IDE, get rubymine.
Depends on how good your shell-fu is ;-)
DB
sqlite >:)
Server
For development, rails server should do. For production, my recommendation is unicorn, paired with nginx.
Further stuff:
http://github.com/edgecase/ruby_koans
And go for rails 3 beta.
Tutorials
ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/quickstart
Ruby community
ruby-lang.org/en/community/
I think Linux(Fedora) would be best for you
For data base mysql is very popular
most prefered web server
http://www.modrails.com/
http://github.com/fauna/mongrel
Ruby mine is good IDE
http://www.jetbrains.com/ruby/
is it better to develop ruby on rails in a) windows b) linux or c) mac. why ?
edited :
the reason why i am asking this is that i heard that developing ruby on rails in windows is not as stable/good compared when you used ruby on rails in mac. (not sure though if that is true or not).
plus the fact that David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of Ruby on Rails) seems to be using Mac, so initial impressions seems to be Ruby on Rails applications and Mac goes well together.
I strongly advise you don't develop on Windows. Why? First, there are a lot of things that break on Windows with every upgrade and the majority of gem or plugin creators don't use windows so they don't care about windows and don't run tests on it(there are several big name people who have flat out said that windows is NOT their problem it's yours). You'll find the *nix vs Windows problems will bite you in the ass again and again. Pathnames slashes, minor differences in ssh implementations, console and font problems, rubygems, capistrano, etc...
What will end up happening after a while is that you will always have this voice in the back of your head every time you have to debug something saying "Is this a problem only on Windows?" and that little voice is a cost to you..using up some of your battery every single day.
Macs are more expensive in terms of upfront dollars (which sadly I don't have) and linux platforms are more expensive terms of spending a day or two trying to get your wireless to work but those are upfront one time costs. The nagging insecurity of using Windows for Rails development is an ongoing cost. At least until the community starts rejecting things that are not truly cross platform.
As an example look at cucumber. For some reason a test framework is dependent on a particular console configuration not available in windows. So to use it in Windows you have to change the font in your console and change the code page in your console. Otherwise the letter "a" disappears from all the output. Why? Because it works fine for *nix systems and gives you pretty colours (I think this is a huge flaw and very very poor design choice even if you ignore windows).
You'll also feel like the guy who farted in the elevator every time you bring up a windows issue.
I say all this as some who has to use windows for his development platform at the moment. Hey, what's that smell?
[late edit: Ruby is also about 3 times slower on windows. This will impact your willingness run your tests all the time and hurt your TDD feedback cycle]
Shouldn't matter, whatever you're most comfortable with. I've done all three.
I suppose Windows is a little uncomfortable because of not being unix-based, the CLI is a bit more clunky.
(But if you use a tool like NetBeans, you don't really even need the CLI much)
I recommend against using windows when developing an app that will later be deployed on a linux system. If you're developing an app for practice, Windows is fine.
The issue is that if you're aiming at linux, then you'll want to have a full stack on your development machine: a web server, a dbms, perhaps memcached, etc. While it is possible to load all of that onto windows (I've done it), it will take longer than on a linux machine, will be slower and you'll have more difficulty finding assistance when something doesn't work.
Also, you can run into gem and plugin support issues on windows. Eg \ instead of / for directory paths and other weirdness. While rubyists will try to be helpful, windows support is sometimes limited since most RoR work is done on Mac or Linux machines.
Eg Capistrano has had problems running on Windows (they may be fixed now).
As an alternative, you can use Windows as your desktop machine, but use a linux machine as your development server for running the app. Any old pc will run linux just fine. Use samba to remotely access and edit the files from your windows machine. The linux machine does not need a display, you'll only use it remotely.
Just change your app's config/environments/development.rb to include
config.action_controller.consider_all_requests_local = true
so you can see stack traces from your browser running on your windows machine.
Regards,
Larry
Ruby on Rails works well on all platforms, but tool support varies. For instance, TextMate is a favorite editor amongst Rubyists, and it's Mac only. You'll be able to find lots of helpful tools for working with RoR in TextMate, so it might be best to do RoR development on a Mac.
I use Mac and Linux myself.
A Unix based system will offer you a path of lest resistance as all gems are available/compilable on these systems, which isn't as easy on a Windows machine. It's not impossible on Windows but you'll spend more time getting it to work rather in some cases rather than doing work.
Of those Unix systems my preferred is a Mac, it's got all the Unix power as well as all the interface niceties that can be lacking from your linux system, and of course I couldn't live without my daily dose of TextMate, so Mac it is.
I started life as a programmer in 1981 on early Unix systems. I stayed a pure Unix person through 1995. Then 'stuff' happened, (business ownership), and Windows came into my life.
So in 2007 I start learning RoR, pure Windows. I deployed on Joyent, which is Solaris. I've successfully developed two large apps, developed on Windows, and deployed on Solaris/Apache/Mongrel, without major incident.
The only Windows issue I ever remember is that I had to force filesystem reads and writes into binary mode to fix a 'development' vs. 'deployment' issue.
I honestly don't see any problem with developing on Windows and Deploying on Unix. But I had an extensive Unix background, I'm not sure the story would have been the same had I not know Unix.
Also, I'll only ever work on the RoR apps I build for my business. I'll never need to build any other RoR apps, I'll never develop any plugins, never have to take over another project, never have anyone INSIST I include something only available in something that doesn't work well with my Windows development environment, etc...
I'd say this:
If you are responsible for developing a Web app for your employer, and that employer is Windows based, that SHOULD NOT preclude you from considering RoR as platform. The app would have to be deployed by a third party, unless your employer is large enough and the project important enough to warrant in house Unix systems.
So if you know SQUAT about Unix, you MAY need a little help along the way. If you go with a third party Rails host, check out their support forums, make sure there are people willing and able to talk a non-Unix person through any deployment/setup and maintenance issues.
I'll give you an example, on Joyent, if I want to run a migration, I have to go through their Database GUI thingy, log into the database, then 'execute' a command. OK, so I get a simple text_field where I enter input destined for a Unix shell, which is:
cd /user/myhome/sites/mysite && rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production
That might not have been so easy to figure out had I not had the Unix background.
As of Ruby 1.9.2 and Rails 3.2, Windows is a lot slower for autotest and spork (one full cycle took ~15 seconds on average compared to mere seconds on Linux for the same project), but I enjoy better gui-centric git tools and functionality (TortoiseGit, WinSCP) among other things since I am much more familiar with Windows. I have verified that the essential features I need are working on both platforms, so I find breakage to be a lesser issue compared to speed.
Doesn't matter, If you're a purist then your dev environment should as closely match your production enviroment as possible with regard to Operating System and version of the Ruby and Rails. But really it doesn't matter much.
Some gems work on Mac but not some flavors of Linux (such as gitjour when I last tried it).
Using a Mac might be good or bad, depending on whether you want to know that whatever you develop will be able to work on any other OS.
I've done light rails development on both OSX and Linux (Ubuntu), and I found the differences to be almost imperceptible (in terms of ruby and rails... obviously the desktop environments are a lot different between the two OS's).
As others have said, most ruby/rails tutorials, gems, plugins, etc. are oriented toward Unix type systems, so I would assume there may be some annoying hiccups trying to do ruby/rails development in Windows, unless of course you're using IronRuby. :-)
A low hassle alternative for setting up a Unix environment for Rails development is to run one of the easier to use Linux distributions, like Ubuntu or Fedora under virtualization software like VMWare, VirtualBox, VirtualPC, etc.
I agree with many of the previous posts that Rails on Windows can be an issue. Its simply the case that many people developing for Rails are on Macs or Linux and as a result Windows bugs are not found, this is particularly an issue with plugins.
One issue with Rails is IDEs. TextMate on the Mac seems to be a popular choice, yet Linux and Windows options are pretty fragmented. Normally I wouldn't worry about this, but I have found that Rails becomes much more manageable when you have IDE support. In general there are lots of files located in a reasonably complex directory structure so having an IDE which allows you to easily find files your looking for is an awesome productivity boost.
Another thing you may want to consider is what your deployment environment looks like. For example, may people deploy there Rails apps on Linux servers. In that case, you may be able to skirt around bugs by developing on OS X, but unfortunately those bugs will crop up when you go to deploy your new software. That is the last place you want to be debugging code. Of course you should be testing your code in a staging environment first, but all too often people skip this step.
While searching for the answer to this question due to always having to hack my way around windows to things to work while developing in Ruby, I can say that if you have the option, use Linux or Mac. I've officially started using Ubuntu 9.04 as of today and here are the reasons why:
1) Can't do any ssh things like use Capistrano, vlad, create gems for rubyforge, etc. You can do these things using cygwin, but it's such a pain in the arse to use cygwin and windows working for everything.
2) The final straw was when trying to kick off background tasks in a rails app only to realize that windows can't fork processes.... didn't even bother with cygwin for this one, just switched to Ubuntu so I don't have to keep working around these issues.
Ubuntu 9.0.4 is pretty hot though, quite impressed so it may not be so bad.