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Ruby Installing a Ruby Development Environment Installing a Ruby Development Environment Installing the Treehouse VM on Windows

Kaiyang Lin
Kaiyang Lin
5,573 Points
Posted by Kaiyang Lin
Kaiyang Lin
5,573 Points

What is the Treehouse virtual machine for?

I'm currently on the "Installing a Ruby Development Environment" course, and after the first segment on how to install ruby and rails on a windows PC, the course's next segment is instructions about how to install the Treehouse VM.

What I'm confused about is why there is a need to install the VM - or really, what the purpose of the VM is. It seems as though we use the VM to test our rails app, but weren't we already able to do that without installing the VM (we were able to access our rails app at localhost after installing ruby, rails and the other relevant gems)?

Thank you for clarifying!

1 Answer

Jason Anello
Jason Anello
Courses Plus Student 94,610 Points

Hi Kaiyang,

It might not have been made clear in the videos but the vm is optional. You would either install all the software on your windows pc or you would use the virtual machine which contains all the software already setup.

It sounds like you already have the software set up on windows so you could just go with that and not worry about the vm. I would still watch the videos though so you at least know what it's about.

Also, the videos have a note in the Teacher's Notes section below the video that mentions there are newer versions of these videos available as workshops.

check below this video for the links:

https://teamtreehouse.com/library/installing-a-ruby-development-environment/installing-a-ruby-development-environment/installation-overview

I would recommend watching those as well to see if you need to make any updates or changes to what you've already done.

Kaiyang Lin
Kaiyang Lin
5,573 Points
Kaiyang Lin
Kaiyang Lin
5,573 Points

Hi Jason,

Thanks for clarifying! I actually saw the later version of the videos as workshops after posting this question, and I've checked them out! I will follow the setup in that video.

Thank you again for explaining about the VM, was getting pretty lost amongst the more technical software that was needed!