MIT Libraries Development Rails Box

This repository contains a VagrantFile and support scripts that will configure a local VM suitable for developing Rails applications.

What it installs

• apt packages necessary for typical rails development
• rvm (to manage ruby versions)
• a version of ruby and the bundler gem
• the heroku command line interface tool

How to use it

On your local computer

• Install vagrant
• Clone this repo locally
• vagrant up in the cloned directory of this repo
• git clone the repo you want to work on into src
  • NOTE: you can do this for multiple projects instead of having a VM for each.
• vagrant ssh gets you a shell on the rails vm
• Note: do all your development using your preferred tools on your local computer. Do your git work on your local as well.
• vagrant halt when you want to shutdown the vm (vagrant up to bring it back)

On the rails VM

• cd /vagrant/src/YOUR_PROJECT gets you to the linked directory
• bundle install whenever you need to install gems
• bin/rails test to run tests
• heroku local to run a dev server. We use heroku local instead of bin/rails server so we can easily load environment variables by dropping a .env file in src on your local (or /vagrant/src/YOUR_PROJECT in the vm as they are the same thing)

Caveats

This does not use Ansible due to a requirement to work on Windows.

Making Changes

If you end up needing additional packages installed to get gems to work, adding them to the provision.sh will probably make it easier later if it's a fairly common gem.