How-to: Portable Rails Development on a USB Drive
Posted by Jon Lee in How-to, Ruby on Rails, Web Development, tags: aptana, eclipse, portable-apps, RadRails, Ruby on Rails, usb-drive, web development
As a follow up to a previous article about Portable Web Development on a USB Drive, here are a couple programs you can include to make it Ruby on Rails compatible.
InstantRails
In the original article, I recommended XAMPP Lite as a portable Apache, PHP, MySQL server that doesn’t require installation. You can add a Rails installation to XAMPP but an easier way is to get InstantRails.
InstantRails includes an Apache, PHP/MySQL and Rails preinstalled and preconfigured, all you need to do is to unzip it to your USB drive. InstantRails is based off EasyPHP (similar to XAMPP) so it is also extensible if you wish to install other software onto it as well.
RadRails
RadRails is a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE. It streamlines many of Rail’s features so you don’t even have to touch the command line to create or migrate your rail files. RadRails is currently supported by the Aptana team so you can get it from the Aptana site as either a plug-in for Aptana/Eclipse.
Also, check out this post for instructions on configuring Aptana/Eclipse to run independently off a USB drive.
Configuring Aptana/Eclipse to work with InstantRails
Before you can get started developing Rails applications, you’ll need to configure either Aptana or Eclipse to work with the InstantRails server.
To do this, navigate to Window->Preferences.
Under Ruby->Installed Interpreters, you’ll need to add a new RubyVM pointing to:
\InstantRails\ruby
Under Rails->Configuration (in version 3.3), set the Rails and Rake path to:
\InstantRails\ruby\bin\rails
\InstantRails\ruby\bin\rake
These paths assume you have InstantRails unzipped to the root of the drive (which is recommended).
With all these Portable applications, it seems like 512mb drives might not be enough anymore!
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