I mainly do ruby on rails development on my machine but from time to time I end up using other laptops for RoR development. It would be nice if there was something (maybe shell?) which basically bring all the gems installed on my machine to some other machine without leaving any footprints. It's basically a really light VM without the OS stuff.
If it matters, I'm using a mac. Ideally I would like to keep that virtual environment in my dropbox and basically when I use some other machine, I would just get it from my dropbox and start coding and not have to worry about setting up the environment.
Similar to Jacob's answer, I'd recommend using RVM, but I'll expand on it. Here's some brainstorming ideas:
RVM stores its sandbox in your home directory at ~/.rvm. All Ruby instances, plus the associated gems will be stored there. It's a simple addition to the ~/.bashrc file in your Mac to initialize RVM so it's known by the shell when you log into the account. It's also a simple rm -rf ~/.rvm from the commandline to remove the RVM sandbox from the account, followed by removing the line from the ~/.bashrc.
So, basically, by setting up RVM correctly and installing your Ruby installation on one machine, you're 90% of the way to having it available for multiple machines.
I'm pretty sure Ruby will install without any dependencies on a current Mac OS using RVM, but there's a couple libraries that can improve the experience. After installing RVM, but before installing any Rubies, run rvm notes. That will show you what else to install. You'll need the current XCode to compile a Ruby, but only on the machine you do the compiling on. Once it's installed you should be able to move a RVM controlled Ruby around to other Macs by copying the ~/.rvm directory. So, not only would you have the gems, you could have a particular version, or versions, of Ruby, plus the associated gems, so your regression tests could work too.
If you use MacVim you could install it in ~/bin and have the GUI version. I haven't tried running it from there, but it seems like it'd work. You might need to create an alias from /Applications to the one in ~/bin for double-clicking.
MacVim comes with a shell script called mvim to launch it from the command-line. I have a bunch of softlinks to mine letting me call it from the command-line in various ways: gvim, and the gvim varients like gvimdiff and gview. You could do the same by adding ~/bin to your PATH and making the links locally in that dir to MacVim's mvim.
You could build a tarball of the vim config, vim installation and RVM sandbox, copy that to another Mac, expand it, add ~/bin to your PATH and append the needed RVM initialization line in ~/.bashrc, open a new command-line, and have your editor plus Ruby sandboxes.
It's a minor variation on how my Mac and Linux boxes are set up. I haven't tried bundling everything together, but, on Macs that are the same OS version, it should work.
Consider using rvm to manage different gem configurations. If you want you can store your rvm configurations in your dropbox (rather than in ~/.rvm, where they go by default) so that your gemsets are synced across machines.
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I hope this question is suitable for this forum, I'm still learning what's deemed fit and what isn't. Anyway here is my question, a lot of places seem to state I need to install homebrew on my mac to install rails, do I really need to and what benefits does it offer to do so and for the development environment?
This question is pretty bad but I remember when I started programming that I had a similar question, so here we go:
How do you install stuff on your computer? Obviously you use the Mac App Store if you want something from Apple, and if you want to install Chrome just go the Google Chrome website etc.
But when you want some kind of programmer tool, let's say a compiler. How do you install this? Either you go to their website, download a tarball with the source code, compile it from scratch and bind the necessary environment variables. Or you are unlucky and the compiler has a bunch of dependencies so you have to download them first.
Then some geniuses thought that "Oh damn, that's a pain", so instead they created so called package managers, so now when I want Rails on my computer, I just installed it through the "gem" ruby package/dependency manager.
So you can install rails through the command "gem" (just google "ruby gem") and you'll see what it is, but I advise you to if you want to have a nice development environment where it's easy to install and uninstall stuff, use brew or macports.
I was reading a blog post about installing git, and it says it will be installed in /usr/bin/git
When I check my version using $ which git, terminal shows /usr/local/bin/git. Same result when I checked for Ruby. Does it make different where Git, Ruby or Rails are installed? Can I change that if it's possible?
Normally, it should not matter. But, usually, /usr/local/bin is ahead of /usr/bin in the PATH environment variable. So, in future, if another version of the same software, lets say git, is installed into /usr/local/bin, that will take precedence over the one installed in /usr/bin. You can of course manipulate your PATH environment variable to suite your needs.
run this command to see if multiple versions of git have been installed
which -a git
It does not matter as long as all of them are accessible in your PATH for commands.
Is your concern about where the actual repositories will be located - the place where GIT repositories are located is not necessarily the same place where GIT itself is installed.
You probably could change it. It might not be worth it.
It will probably be easier just to leave it and remember.
This is sorta like windows install path. Default will be "Program Files" but it often can be changed.
Note that different versions of Windows have differently named program files. This can be an example of such differences also.
Finally it could be that your ruby installed GIT, and that is the path that Ruby chose.
As long as /usr/local/bin/git is in your PATH you should not notice any differences.
I am new to vim, and I just followed this setup tutorial, but something went wrong. I am a ruby developer and I am not getting a a ruby highlighting syntax. I have installed janus, before with pathogen I had syntax highlighting but not know.
Also I am using the solarized theme the guy suggested but there is no difference now (in color) between folders and files in my terminal when listing a directory.
Could somebody tell me if I can install pathogen with janus? WIll this break my vim?
Thanks!
Don't install anything (and don't install Janus).
Run $ vimtutor in your terminal. As many times as needed (and don't install Janus).
Once you feel ready to use Vim for day-to-day coding, install MacVim which is built with a better feature set than the default Vim. It comes with a CLI executable so you can use it in your terminal and in tmux (and don't install Janus).
Install the vim-ruby package for better, more up-to-date Ruby support (and don't install Janus).
Don't install Janus. This thing is a pile of crap that will make your life overly complicated, hook you on plugins that may or may not be the best for you needs and prevent you from actually learning Vim properly in exchange of an artificially flattened learning curve.
Decide for a plugin/runtimepath management solution (VAM, vundle or plain Pathogen) and choose your plugins yourself according to your needs (and don't install Janus).
If you have problems with Solarized, take a look at their issue tracker and their wiki. It is fragile and you need some work to set it up correctly (and… you know the rest).
I've set up a new user account on my mac so I can let a pair programmer ssh into my computer, does this mean I have to reinstall rvm and rails and configure my bash files and terminal window and all that messing about or is there a magic way of transferring everything over to the new user account as is?
It depends on how things have been installed. If git and other utilities have been installed under /opt or /usr/local, the new user could just add the relevant 'bin' directories to their PATH and pick those up "for free".
With rvm, I think part of the design goal is to completely sandbox each user and application into their own environment if necessary. So sharing your rvm installation is probably not a good idea.
I'm learning ruby and I had an advanced developer working with me. He installed a bunch of gemsets and adjusted configurations and I need to know how to remove it all and start from scratch so that I can follow along with tutorials. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
It sounds like he's installed rvm since you're referring to gemsets? If so, you can simply delete the entire ~/.rvm folder and it should switch back to using system ruby.