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Is Vagrant a good solutions for creating a Rails environment in windows?

I have a powerful Windows 8 64bit desktop. I recently did a project with RoR and fell in love with it. As I found out, installing RoR on windows is just bleh; so I created a dual boot to ubuntu. As a creative developer, I find it rather difficult to get any of the "creative" done in ubuntu because of the lack of my typical creative tools.

I read a bit about a tool called Vagrant; however, I'm still unsure if it meets my requirements: adobe suite, sublime text, git, rails, rails friendly OS(mac?/ubuntu)

Typical duties: edit an image in photoshop(windows), drop it to project assets in VM? Typical duties: push/pull to git; ssh to VPS server?

Also, I hear you can install mac os in the VM do you think thats a good option? (because I want to try their new OS)

Armeen Moon
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2 Answers2

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Installing osx in Vagrant is probably possible but it would likely be quite hard, and its not really what vagrant is designed for.

As for your other questions vagrant sounds like the perfect fit.

With Vagrant you could start up an ubuntu vm and get your rails setup going. Then you could just forward a port on your local machine to the vm and load the rails site as if it were running locally on your windows PC. A quick google gets this vagrant box that looks like it might work for you - https://github.com/amaia/rails-starter-box

To work with the site you can just share a folder between the vm and your local machine which will allow you to edit images and code with your windows apps (Photoshop, sublime) so you don't actually need to install these in the ubuntu vm at all, and can pretty much work as normal.

Git is much the same... I prefer to SSH into the vagrant box and use git on the command line in ubuntu but you can just as easily use gitbash or tortoisegit from windows in the repo folder... works just as well.

Matt Cooper
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  • The link to the rails-dev-box above is for development work on the rails environment itself. This is not a machine to develop rails apps with. – Ecnalyr Jun 28 '13 at 11:48
  • @Ecnalyr Thanks for picking up that error... changed the link to a rails starter box... if you have a better link let me know. – Matt Cooper Jun 28 '13 at 13:21
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A good alternative is, https://github.com/fgrehm/ventriloquist

"Ventriloquist combines Vagrant and Docker to give developers the ability to configure portable and disposable development VMs with ease. It lowers the entry barrier of building a sane working environment without the need to learn tools like Puppet or Chef."

tilljoel
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