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Ruby

Posted by McFadden Gavender
McFadden Gavender
4,893 Points

Treehouse Virtual Machine for Rails

I'm starting to dive into Ruby on Rails and I recently took the course on installing a Rails environment.

One of the tools the course recommended installing was a Treehouse Virtual Machine - however, not many details were given on exactly what this tools does.

Is it needed anytime I'm working on a Rails project (seems unlikely)? What are the benefits to using it?

Thanks in advance!

1 Answer

Maciej Czuchnowski
Maciej Czuchnowski
36,441 Points

Virtual machine is a "computer simulated inside your operating system" - a program that thinks that it's a separate computer and has everything pre-installed by Treehouse team. The benefit is that it already has installed everything you need for the particular course and in proper versions and you don't have to mess with your own operating system and set up your own development environment. If you feel comfortable enough, you can set up everything on your own and develop Rails projects on your own system. Just be prepared for some hoops along the way and make sure you know how (and why) to switch between different versions of Ruby, Rails and other gems within projects.