This project automates the setup of a development environment for Ruby on Rails core development. This is the easiest way to build a box with everything ready to start hacking on your pull request, all in an isolated virtual machine.

The virtual machine runs on top of VirtualBox.

We use Vagrant to build and provision the virtual machine:

gem install vagrant 

Building the virtual machine is this easy:

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

That's it.

If the base box is not present that command fetches it first. The setup itself takes about 3 minutes in my MacBook Air. After the installation has finished, you can access the virtual machine with

vagrant ssh 

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.

• Git

• Ruby 1.9.3

• Bundler

• SQLite3, MySQL, and Postgres

• System dependencies for nokogiri, sqlite3, mysql, mysql2, and pg

• Databases and users needed to run the Active Record test suite

• therubyracer

• Memcached

The first time you log into the box you generally want to configure Git:

git config --global user.name "John Doe" git config --global user.email johndoe@example.com 

set up your SSH keys, and clone your fork.

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

vagrant suspend 

then, resume to hack again

vagrant resume 

Run

vagrant halt 

to shutdown the virtual machine, and

vagrant up 

to boot it again.

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

vagrant destroy # DANGER: all is gone 

Please check the Vagrant documentation for more information on Vagrant.