virtual ruby development environment

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.