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Ruby

James Nelson
James Nelson
23,956 Points
Posted by James Nelson
James Nelson
23,956 Points

Installing a ruby env

Hello guys,

I am new to ruby and I am just working my through the 'installing a ruby env' course on treehouse. Although I have almost complete the stage I feel like I don't quite understand what I'm downloading and why.

Could someone explain the simplest terms what is Vagrant and why we need this to install a Treehouse VM?

And what is the difference between the VM provided by Oracle and Treehouse's VM?

Thanks

1 Answer

Musannif Zahir
Musannif Zahir
1,414 Points

Vagrant makes it easy to create consistent development environments across various systems (Windows, Linux, OS X, etc.). By having your development environment in a VM, you avoid the "But it works for me" issues, even across different platforms.

There are a lot of default/base VMs for Vagrant that you can use as a starting point when creating your own image. You can see a full list at http://www.vagrantbox.es

You're downloading the Treehouse VM as it's a customized development environment for this course. Vagrant is not required to setup a ruby environment but it provides an easy way for someone to create an image of a working ruby environment and having you fire it up so that you can dabble in ruby without having to go through installing everything.