Ruby on Rails: A Vista Dev Environment

After my 17″ Mac Book Pro caught fire the other day and then the replacement MacBook broke again, I decided to turn my Lenovo X61 Tablet into a “Ruby on Rails” development environment for TheFunded.com. It is well known that Rails is not optimized for Windows, but I managed to get an impressive system in place.

Here is the infrastructure that I already had in place:

• Host at Rails Machine on a virtual server that can be easily upgraded as more capacity is needed – http://railsmachine.com/
• Use Subversion for asset management and version control – http://subversion.tigris.org/
• Use Capistrano to deploy from a development environment to the servers and restart everything correctly – http://www.capify.org/
  • Capistrano does not work on Windows, unfortunately, so manual server restarts will be required for a Windows deployment.

Here is what I downloaded and added to my Windows Vista machine:

• Install ActiveState Komodo Edit (free!) for an excellent project-based text editor with Ruby syntax – http://www.activestate.com/
  • In many ways, it’s better than the TextMate on the Mac, believe it or not
• Install TortoiseSVN (free!) to acquire and browse your Subversion content, as well as examine file differentials – http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/
• Download Instant Rails (free!), which is like Locomotive for the Mac, except Instant Rails has Ruby on Rails, Apache, PHP, MySQL, and PHPMyAdmin, too – http://instantrails.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl
• Download PuTTY (free!) as an SSH-capable Terminal emulator for your remote admin needs – http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
  • Here is a nice tutorial on on using PuTTY to establish an SSH tunnel connection with MySQL – Tutorial
• Buy Navicat MySQL ($129) for a nice GUI local and remote SQL administration tool with SSH connection capabilities – http://www.navicat.com/
  • If the $129 price is too steep (and since everything else here is free), try MySQL GUI Tools (free!) – http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/gui-tools/5.0.html

These are the actions that it took to get started:

• Install all of your new applications and reboot. You need to use a special ZIP utility to unpack Instant Rails and maintain the directory structure, called 7-zip – http://www.7-zip.org/
• Launch Instant Rails and pop a ruby command line open using the GUI to “gem update rails –include-dependencies“, bringing your Ruby environment up-to-date.
• Download and place your project into the “rails_apps” in the Instant Rails folder by right clicking in your Windows environment with the new Tortoise right-click menu options.
• Edit your project’s database.yml and environment.rb files with any changes using Komodo Edit (you do not have to change the patch to Ruby in dispatch.rb).
  • The default MySQL database in Instant Rails is “localhost” or “127.0.0.1″ with a username of “root” and no password.
• Download your MySQL database from the server using a tool of your choice and load it into the local MySQL version through the Instant Rails PHPMyAdmin.

You are done! Launch your application in Instant Rails, start editing away with Komodo, preview your changes, and commit your updates with Tortoise!