Rails 4.0 support

[lengarvey]

We need to have Rails 4.0 support for the install fest guides.

At the moment, though, we can't support RailsInstaller because of :railsinstaller/railsinstaller-nix#20

[lengarvey]

I anticipate using Vagrant to support Rails 4. I've got a setup working with Vagrant and Ubuntu and have a nicely packages fairly minimal box that I've packaged up. I need to do some testing of the instructions on a Windows PC.

In the meantime the docs need to be rewritten to be Rails 4 compatible. Even now we occasionally get people showing up to InstallFest with Rails 4 ready to install.

Please use the feature/rails4_guide branch to do this work.

[lengarvey]

@geoffroh I seem to recall that you said you had some updates on the guide for Rails 4. If you could supply them here it would be great.

[ralovely]

How about using Nitrous.io ?
It's pretty solid and might be 'lighter' than Vagrant to digest for students.
It's already set up with rails 4.

[lengarvey]

It's not a bad idea, but the promise of installfest is to actually install a development environment onto the laptops of the attendees. At this stage I'm just exploring vagrant, although it seems very easy to setup and use right now.

[ralovely]

Vagrant is really a nice system, easy enough for the purpose I think.
I heard many good things about docker.io, too (but I haven't tried it yet).

the event is indeed geared toward installing (hense the name),
but I'm not sure it's contradictory with Nitrous:
online environments are clearly one of the futures of dev
(and a bright one I think. I wouldn't be surprised if GitHub was heading there).
You'd still be providing newbies with a way to develop on their own.

In the end, is the main promise to install the environment or to make the first app ?
I'd say it's more Ruby and Rails than Sysadmin and Devops
(but I'm new to the project, so I may be wrong).

I don't have Vagrant at all on my machine right now (new machine),
so I will set it up from scratch to get a fresher opinion.

[lengarvey]

Largely I agree with you.

One thing I'd like to have eventually on the installfest site (which as you can see I've been building) is a section devoted to how to get setup. Perhaps we could have a guide on how to get started with Nitrious.io?

In terms of vagrant the setup is really easy. If you're keen to do it yourself I'd recommend following the excellent Railscast: http://railscasts.com/episodes/292-virtual-machines-with-vagrant?view=asciicast

[lengarvey]

I'll be writing a guide on how to get setup with vagrant, although I've prebuilt a box (effectively a virtual machine image) so the whole process to get a fully professionaly Rails environment is ~4 steps:

1. Install Ruby
2. gem install vagrant
3. vagrant add box rails-dev http://address.to/prebuilt.box
4. mkdir dev && cd dev && vagrant init rails-dev && vagrant ssh

[ralovely]

I think that giving a few ways to setup is great.
Not too many though, something like

• "regular packages" (RailsInstaller),
• Local VM (Vagrant)
• Online VM (Nitrous)
  The three can almost be environment agnostic.
  Each path has to define the key concepts (mainly the filesystem & the terminal),
  and then proceed to the Rails part.
  The path might fork again along the road though,
  on steps like deploying to heroku, connectng to Git…

I played a lot with Vagrant a few months ago,
and I'm still on cellular Internet (for another 2 weeks or so),
so I will skip it for now.

I can definitely look into the Nitrous path, though.

What is your timeframe for this ?
Do you want to keep maintaining the 3.2 version with these, or do you go full 4 once it's ready ?

[lengarvey]

We've got the content for 3.2 and eventually we'll deprecate it and hide it away on the site. Right now our focus is getting the site up and running, then developing some more content including the Rails 4 guides.

I'd love it if you could look into nitrous. I'm particularly interested in how it works from Australia. Especially in terms of stability and latency.

[ralovely]

No pb, I'll look into Nitrous, I'll share with you what I'll have so far Tuesday.
They are based on AWS, and have an Oceania region (which is in Sydney).
So far, on cellular network, it's been stable and fast enough.