A Portable Rails Development Environment

Tony being the 'biz guy' just has to have his Windows Office Suite and thus any work he does on the site is done from Windows.

Our site is built using Subversion, Ruby, Rails and PostgreSQL. All of these work on Windows but none of them are first class citizens. We did get him setup using the various installers but it wasn't easy and took some time.

When I got the IM that he got a fresh laptop and needed his development environment setup again I didn't reply for 3 days. After that I got the idea of having him use an Ubuntu install on the free VMWare player. This way we could setup a complete development environment once and he could move it to any machine he wanted.

We still needed to setup a working Rails stack on Ubuntu but with there are various good resources on how to do that. The free PeepCode screencast (download the free preview for the server setup video) would be my first choice if I was doing it from scratch.

Once you get your virtual server running on your desktop you still have one more item to take care of before you can use your Windows tools for doing development. That is mounting your home folder from your virtual server to a drive letter in Windows. There is a fantastic piece of software called SFtpDrive which lets you do just that. It isn't free but it comes with a great 6 week trial period which gives you plenty of time to decide if it's worth it.

So there you have it. A first class development environment for doing Rails development under Windows. You get the power of Linux with the familiarity of Windows.

(Disclaimer: I don't have any personal interest in these products. I've used them and have found them to be high quality and useful tools.)