HACKER Q&A
📣 nickelcitymario

What's your Rails dev environment?


This is for all the Rails developers out there. I'm perpetually dissatisfied with my own environments for Rails. Running locally is a never ending game of whack-a-mole as dependencies always seem to be breaking. I'm an indie dev in my free time, but every time I sit down to work on my app, I end up spending the whole time troubleshooting my dev environment.

What have you found works best? Pre-built Virtual Box image? Vagrant? Kubernetes? Do you just run everything locally?

I've tried:

- Running locally on my Mac - VirtualBox with a fresh install of Ubuntu. - VirtualBox with pre-build images meant for Rails. - Vagrant with a pre-built image meant for Rails.

...and lots of variations on those themes. They've all proven to be nightmares for me.

Would love to hear from other devs on this, especially indie devs who need things to be as lean and simple as possible. I love Rails (well, I love Ruby and more-or-less like Rails) and don't want to move away from it. But maintaining my dev environment is a nightmare, in ways that I've never experienced with other languages and frameworks.


  👤 silens Accepted Answer ✓
I haven't had many issues with rails.

In the past I used rvm on ubuntu, currently I utilise asdf-vm on a ubuntu windows subsystem for linux. All rails apps I'm on utilise docker for production and ci/cd.


👤 nelsonenzo
docker with volume mounted directories for live updates.