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Ruby Installing Rails on Mac

Has Treehouse ever considered adding instructions for how to install Rails via a browser-based IDE like CodeAnywhere?

I've tried in the past to install Rails locally without much success and talking to others it seemed to be a major hurdle to learning Rails. I've used CodeAnywhere before and that seemed to be way easier. Just wondering if Treehouse has ever consider it.

2 Answers

Jay McGavren
STAFF
Jay McGavren
Treehouse Teacher

We try to avoid tying our courses to particular proprietary products (such as CodeAnywhere). Instructions we create for one product won't help students who choose to use a different product.

That said, this page makes it appear to me that CodeAnywhere offers a pre-made "container" with Rails installed. You'll be on your own for learning to set up and start CodeAnywhere containers (unless there are any other students on here that can help), but I'm guessing once you do, you'll be able to follow along with the course using that container.

I gave it a shot and so far so good. It's free and no credit card is required. Some of the commands are slightly different. For example, I don't need to type "bin/". Also, starting up the server is a little different. I can do it with "rails s --binding=0.0.0.0" and then click on the 2nd https link at the bottom of the info page.

Everything else seems to be about the same but I can see why there may be a little hesitation to list it as another option since similar sites like Nitrous went out of business and Cloud9 was acquired by Amazon.