Furousha

A Vagrant setup for Rails development!

Table of Contents

1. What is Furousha?
2. Prerequisites
3. Starting It Up
4. Creating a Project
5. Using Git with your Rails project
6. Guard::LiveReload Usage
7. MailCatcher
8. Screen!
9. Thanks, etc.

1. What is Furousha?

When I started working with Ruby/Rails, it dawned on me that despite the fact I wanted to work in Windows (I'm also a gamer), it was a poor OS choice for the language. I thought about various solutions, including dual-booting...but decided that a VM was the best way to deal with things...enter Vagrant.

I was told about Vagrant by a good friend of mine (Craig McKechnie). Vagrant is a system used for deploying customisable Virtual Machine environments, which can be based on numerous Boxes, and provisioned in various ways (Puppet, Chef, Shellscripts).

This project is such a setup, aimed at Windows users who want to develop Rails apps in a better (read: Linux) environment, allowing them to use their favorite IDE of choice, while running their development app in an environment more suited to doing so.

Furousha includes the following:

• Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) (x86)
• Ubuntu Packages:
  • libxml2
  • nodejs
  • screen
  • vim
• RVM - Ruby Version Manager
• Ruby 2.0.0-p247 (x86) - Set as system default
• Ruby Gems:
  • puppet - Provisioning system for Vagrant, etc.
  • rails - MVC-based web framework for Ruby
  • rspec-rails - Testing framework for Ruby/Rails
  • capybara - Integration testing for RSpec/Rails
  • haml - Alternate templating language
  • guard-livereload - LiveReload, for Rails development
  • devise - Rails authentication system
  • mailcatcher - Mock SMTP setup for things like Devise registration

2. Prereqisites

In order to get started with Furousha/Vagrant, you must have the following installed:

• VirtualBox -- Vagrant's VMs are by default based on VirtualBox, as it works via VBoxManage.
• Vagrant itself.
• LiveReload plugin for your browser (if you plan to use Guard::LiveReload)
  • Safari -- (link)
  • Chrome -- (link)
  • Firefox -- (link)

Download links are at the end of this documentation.

3. Starting up your environment.

Getting started with Furousha is pretty easy. First, clone this repository into a folder of your choosing:

git clone https://github.com/misutowolf/furousa.git <project name>

Then, just jump to your project folder and fire up your VM:

cd <project name>
vagrant up

Vagrant should then grab the base box (if you don't have it already), and then provision it (using Puppet).

4. Starting a project

In order to get started with a Rails project, you'll need to SSH into your Vagrant box and generate one using Rails:

vagrant ssh
cd /vagrant/
rails new <project>

This will create a new Rails project in the default Vagrant synced folder, /vagrant/. This will allow you to edit your project files using any editor you want, whether it be oustide the VM (in Windows), or inside (vim/nano/etc.)

5. Using Git with your Rails project

There are a few options available when it comes to the usage of Git to handle your brand new Rails project.

First, you could just switch the Git remote URI using git remote set-url:

git remote set-url origin <Repository URL here>

Then set your URL as the master upstream, allowing you to just use git push:

git branch -u origin/master

Alternatively, you could SSH into your Vagrant VM, and use Git inside the VM:

vagrant ssh
cd /vagrant/<project folder>
git init
git remote add origin <URL here>
git branch -u origin/master
git add -A
git commit -m "First commit!"
git push

Personally, I'd go with the former...as it takes advantage of Vagrant itself, allowing other users access to the EXACT environment in which your project is contained. That's the whole point of Vagrant, after all.

6. Guard::LiveReload

The gem for LiveReload comes pre-installed with this setup. However, due to a bug with Guard, invoking Guard with your Rails project in typical fashion doesn't work. When it comes to using LiveReload within Furousha, first add it to your project's Gemfile:

group :development do
  gem 'guard-livereload'
end

Then make sure it's installed in your project:

bundle install

After you've got the gem in your project, you must force polling when running Guard, after adding proper lines to your Guardfile:

bundle exec guard init livereload
bundle exec guard --force-polling

Port forwarding is already enabled for LiveReload's default port, so no additional steps should not be required.

7. MailCatcher

MailCatcher is a tiny Ruby-driven SMTP server which catches mail and displays it in a browser for the user to see. It's a great way to test mail-sending functionality from your projects without having to use a true mail server.

In order to use it with Rails, the following lines must be added to your site's config/environments/development.rb:

config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :smtp
config.action_mailer.smtp_settings = { :address => "localhost", :port => 1025 }

This will tell the Rails development server to send all mail through MailCatcher.

It seems that there's an issue with MailCatcher, when it comes to being able to access the web interface from outside the virtual machine.

Therefore, you have to invoke it in the following way:

bundle exec mailcatcher --http-ip 0.0.0.0

This will allow you to access the web interface at the following address:

http://localhost:1080

8. Screen!

Due to the fact that you might want to run multiple things inside your Vagrant VM, I opted to add Screen as part of the provisioning process.

Using it for your project might go something like this:

cd <project folder>
screen -S rails
inside screen> rails s
<Ctrl-A, D> (Detach)
screen -S guard
inside screen> bundle exec guard --force-polling
<Ctrl-A, D> (Detach again)
screen -S mailcatcher
bundle exec mailcatcher --http-ip 0.0.0.0
<Ctrl-A, D>

This way, you can keep Guard and your Rails server running in the background, and still be able to do things inside the Vagrant SSH. Screen is awesome!

You can access the screen sessions by using the following commands:

screen -r <rails, guard, or mailcatcher>

Then freely detach from a session using <Ctrl-A, D>

9. Thanks, etc.

Thanks to the guys in #vagrant, #puppet, #rubyonrails, and #ruby for getting all of this stuff working...I had various issues that needed sorting out.

Also, thanks to Craig for showing me Vagrant. It's the perfect solution for the "problem" that needed solving.