Zen Rails Development Environment

Summary

Development environment for Ruby on Rails based on Vagrant, VirtualBox and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus).

The Vagrant provisioning scripts do the following:

• Set the VM locale and time zone.
• Configure the VM for SSH access with a custom SSH key.
• Use RVM to install any version of Ruby and Rails in the VM.
• Install PostgreSQL, configure it to listen on 0.0.0.0, create a new user called ubuntu with password localdbpass and grant it CREATEDB permissions.
• Install MySQL, configure it to listen on 0.0.0.0 and set the password of the root user to localdbpass.
• Install Yarn, Rails' official Frontend package manager as of Rails 5.1.
• Install and configure Git at the VM.
• Install Elastic Beanstalk CLI at the VM.
• Install Heroku CLI at the VM.
• Install Selenium Webdriver, ChromeDriver, and Xvfb. These allow the execution of JavaScript-enabled tests on Minitest or RSpec (with Capybara) using headless Google Chrome.

Other scripts run at shell startup to set environment variables and Bash shortcuts (aliases and functions).

Installation

1. Install the latest version of Vagrant and VirtualBox on the host machine.

2. Choose a directory for your VirtualBox shared folder (in the host machine). Download this repository and unzip it inside the chosen directory.

3. Create an SSH key pair, name the files id_rsa (private key), id_rsa.pub (public key), and place them in the vm_provisioning directory.

4. Edit the Vagrantfile in order to customize the values of the variables located in the "User Configurations" section.

5. Optional: If you require any custom environment variables to be available at the guest VM, create a file named environment_variables.sh within the vm_provisioning directory and set your environment vars using the standard bash syntax: one export VAR_NAME='var value' declaration per line. Those vars will be loaded automatically every time the VM boots. That is a good place to store your API keys and other secrets.

6. Optional: If you wish to use any custom bash aliases or functions, add them to bash_shortcuts.sh

7. Optional: If you intend to use Selenium and Chrome headless with Capybara and RSpec, add the following to spec/rails_helper.rb:

   require 'selenium-webdriver'
   
   Capybara.register_driver :selenium do |app|
     options = Selenium::WebDriver::Chrome::Options.new
     # The window size is important for screenshots
     options.add_argument "--window-size=1366,768"
     Selenium::WebDriver::Chrome.driver_path = "/usr/local/bin/chromedriver"
     Capybara::Selenium::Driver.new(app, 
                                    browser: :chrome, 
                                    options: options)
   end
   

Files and their purposes

Usage

cd to the directory where the Vagrantfile is (in the host machine) and run:

• vagrant up to start the VM;
• vagrant ssh to access the VM via SSH;
• vagrant halt to turn off the VM;

You can also access the VM via SSH by connecting to port 2222 of the host machine with your favorite SSH client, using the private key specified in the ssh_private_key variable of the Vagrantfile.

Shortcuts

All shortcuts except jcurl only work when executed within a Rails app directory.

rs rails s -b 0.0.0.0
rc rails console

br bin/rspec. Use within the Rails application folder to run RSpec with Spring.
brfd bin/rspec --format documentation

tdl tail -f development log
ttl tail -f test log
ctl clear test log
cdl clear development log

jcurl runs curl -s and pretty prints JSON output with the awesome_print gem. Takes a URL as an argument.

bi Run bundle install in multiple parallel threads (faster).

gpl git pull
ga git add
gc git commit. Takes a commit message as an argument.
gp git push. Takes a remote name and a branch name as optional arguments (e.g., origin master)
gs git status
gl git log

Contributing

Bug reports

Please use the issue tracker to report any bugs.

Developing

1. Create an issue and describe your idea
2. Fork it
3. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
4. Commit your changes (git commit -m 'Add some feature')
5. Publish the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
6. Create a Pull Request

License

Released under the MIT License.