A Virtual Machine for Ruby on Rails Development

Introduction

Simple box to get started on Rails projects. While the original bootstrap shell was meant for rails core development, I liked their install function.

Requirements

• VirtualBox

• Vagrant

How To Build The Virtual Machine

Building the virtual machine is this easy:

host $ git clone https://github.com/rails/rails-dev-box.git
host $ cd rails-dev-box
host $ vagrant up

That's it.

After the installation has finished, you can access the virtual machine with

host $ vagrant ssh
Welcome to Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.13.0-55-generic x86_64)
...
vagrant@vagrant:~$

Port 3000 in the host computer is forwarded to port 3000 in the virtual machine. Thus, applications running in the virtual machine can be accessed via localhost:3000 in the host computer. Be sure the web server is bound to the IP 0.0.0.0, instead of 127.0.0.1, so it can access all interfaces:

bin/rails s -b 0.0.0.0

What's In The Box

• Development tools

• Git

• Ruby 2.3

• Bundler

• Postgres

• Database and user needed to run the Active Record test suite

• System dependencies for nokogiri, pg

• Redis

Other notes

Vagrant mounts that directory as /vagrant within the virtual machine:

vagrant@rails-dev-box:~$ ls /vagrant
bootstrap.sh README.md Vagrantfile

We are ready to go to edit in the host, and test in the virtual machine.

Virtual Machine Management

When done just log out with ^D and suspend the virtual machine

host $ vagrant suspend

then, resume to hack again

host $ vagrant resume

Run

host $ vagrant halt

to shutdown the virtual machine, and

host $ vagrant up

to boot it again.

You can find out the state of a virtual machine anytime by invoking

host $ vagrant status

Finally, to completely wipe the virtual machine from the disk destroying all its contents:

host $ vagrant destroy # DANGER: all is gone

Please check the Vagrant documentation for more information on Vagrant.

Faster Rails test suites

The default mechanism for sharing folders is convenient and works out the box in all Vagrant versions, but there are a couple of alternatives that are more performant.

rsync

Vagrant 1.5 implements a sharing mechanism based on rsync that dramatically improves read/write because files are actually stored in the guest. Just throw

config.vm.synced_folder '.', '/vagrant', type: 'rsync'

to the Vagrantfile and either rsync manually with

vagrant rsync

or run

vagrant rsync-auto

for automatic syncs. See the post linked above for details.

NFS

If you're using Mac OS X or Linux you can increase the speed of Rails test suites with Vagrant's NFS synced folders.

With an NFS server installed (already installed on Mac OS X), add the following to the Vagrantfile:

config.vm.synced_folder '.', '/vagrant', type: 'nfs'
config.vm.network 'private_network', ip: '192.168.50.4' # ensure this is available

Then

host $ vagrant up

Please check the Vagrant documentation on NFS synced folders for more information.