After installing VirtualBox and Vagrant, you can use this repo to launch a Ruby on Rails development environment.

Start the VM:

$ vagrant up

SSH into the VM:

$ vagrant ssh

On a fresh VM, the Vagrant provisioning process will install required packages, but it won't install rbenv. For first-time rbenv installation run this on the VM in the /vagrant directory:

$ ./init_rbenv.sh

Exit the SSH session and restart it.

Then, to install Rails, run:

$ ./install_rails.sh

To setup Git, run this:

$ ./setup_git.sh

Edit all of the above files to change versions as they go out-of-date.

Vagrant will synchronize ../vagrant_src on the host with /vagrant_src on the VM. You can put your source files in that directory.

Tip: On the host, use a symbolic link to switch between different projects in different source directories with the same VM without having to modify the Vagrantfile:

$ mkdir ../fancy_rails_app
$ ln -s ../vagrant_src ../fancy_rails_app

When running Rails server, you must allow it to respond to requests from any IP. By default, it will only respond to requests from localhost. Run Rails server like this:

$ rails server -b 0.0.0.0

Vagrant is forwarding port 3000, so you should be able to see your website from the host at http://localhost:3000 .