A virtualized development environment

Again, after just 20 minutes or so, I had everything installed and configured correctly. Thats not to say there weren’t any issues. The main motivation for doing all of this has been to start REALLY learning Ruby on Rails, which has really been making waves in the web development industry for the last three or four years, because the installation of Rails on Windows is far from simple and there are a number of problems with the MySQL module for Rails, which makes learning Rails a little difficult.

I first heard about Rails while I was working at Black Sheep Creative and took a really quick glance at it and decided it wasn’t worth the effort to learn it since Black Sheep was a PHP development house. If I had known then, that I would be moving to the US and working as a freelancer within two years, I might have got on the Rails train a little sooner. Unfortunately, after installing Ruby and Rails and verifying that both installations were working as I had expected, I attempted to install Phusion Passenger, also known as mod_rails, which is an Apache based Rails deployment solution. To my dismay, doing so removed all the PHP references and packages from my system, making it appear that, for moment at least, I can deploy PHP and Rails from the same Apache installation. At this time, I still have not found a solution for this particular problem. So, naturally, I simply uninstalled Passenger and reinstalled PHP and got it working again. At present, I have to start a the built in WEBrick server that comes with Rails by default to test any Rails development. Not the ideal, by a long shot, but it will do for now.

The last thing I installed was Subversion (SVN). This was entirely painless. I simply ran the appropriate command to download and install SVN directly, then I followed a quick tutorial to allow access to SVN via Apache, which basically means I can access my repositories using http:// style paths. This took me all of 15 minutes to do and everything is now working perfectly.