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My Rails dev environment

by Brian Corrigan, May 25th, 2010 at 09:21pm
Posted in: Engineering

I love reading about the way people set up their development environments. I recently started working on a new project at work and had to set everything up from scratch. Here’s my setup.

First, install some gems.

#On all systems
sudo gem install ZenTest
sudo gem install redgreen
sudo gem install autotest-rails
sudo gem install shoulda
sudo gem install factory_girl

# Only on my OSX machine
sudo gem install autotest-growl
sudo gem install autotest-fsevent

# Only on my Ubuntu machine
sudo gem install test_notifier
sudo apt-get install libnotify-bin

Next, I setup my ~/.autotest file:

#!/bin/ruby
require 'redgreen/autotest'
require 'autotest/timestamp'
require "autotest/restart"

#Only Ubuntu
require "test_notifier/autotest"

#Only OSX
require "autotest/growl"
require 'autotest/fsevent'

# All machines
Autotest.add_hook :initialize do |autotest|
  %w{.git .svn .hg .DS_Store ._* vendor tmp log doc}.each do |exception|
    autotest.add_exception(exception)
  end
end

Also, I really like git instaweb. I sent it to G, our brilliant (ex)intern and he likes it too. To start it I use:

git instaweb -d webrick --start

You can automate this by adding the following to your ~/.gitconfig:

[instaweb]
httpd=webrick

You can also add a port option (port=8000) if you want.

Also, to stop instaweb, from the git repo that you started instaweb from run:

git instaweb stop

Finally, I tend to branch a lot and store them server-side. I like tracking branches to automatically push/pull changes to a branch from a remote repository. All this really does is add a few lines to your .gitconfig, but hey, who doesn’t like a shortcut.

  git branch --track branch remote

Last but not least, the Cheat gem is awesome. It’s like man, but distilled to the things you’ll actually use. (It’s actually where I read about instaweb) Use it!

sudo gem install cheat

So in general, that’s the interesting bits of my environment. How about yours?

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One Response to “My Rails dev environment”

  1. Karmen Blake Says:

    Great job!! I used this setup today on a new setup. Thanks!

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