Rails Development Environment in Ubuntu

After my last post, I thought I would share what I use for developing on Ubuntu.

Editor

I have always been a hands-on kinda guy, so I don't use any of the fancy IDEs. Right now, I am using SciTE for two reasons. It feels lightweight and it is available for Linux and Windows. Since my laptop does not have a lot of memory, a lightweight editor is a must. I tried Eclipse, but it chewed up all my memory and slowed things to a crawl. So SciTE with some additional plugins (and information on getting them going) powers the development at McKinney Station.

Ruby and Rails

I am using the latest Ruby and Rails for all new development. For testing I am using RSpec, which seems a lot more intuitive to me. Other gems I have installed include:

• FasterCSV - parsing CSV files
• starfish - simple Ruby Map/Reduce
• mongrel - lightweight Ruby web server
• hpricot - Ruby HTML parser

Database

I love starting all of my development projects with SQLite. It is so easy to get up and running. As the project matures, I am able to quickly switch development over to a MySQL database with a change in the application's database configuration and a quick rake db:migrate.

Version Control

All source code versioning is done with Subversion. With this quick little script, I can get a Rails project committed and started in minutes.

Conclusion

I am always looking for ways to speed up my development process, but so far this is working for me. And it is very enjoyable.