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

Colin Summers
PLUS
Colin Summers
Courses Plus Student 1,388 Points
Posted by Colin Summers
Colin Summers
Courses Plus Student 1,388 Points

Why a VM?

Since Rails (and the server) run fine under MacOS X, why do we install the Treehouse VM? I didn't hear anything about what it was providing or why it was better. Does it more closely simulate the app while it is hosted in the cloud?

3 Answers

Maciej Czuchnowski
Maciej Czuchnowski
36,441 Points
Maciej Czuchnowski
Maciej Czuchnowski
36,441 Points

As far as I understand those videos, they are giving you a choice - install everything normally OR use the VM. The choice is yours. I work on Windows and initially I followed all the videos - installed everything normally and then installed the VM, turned out that VM installation was useless, since I had everything already installed from previous videos. As Bradan said, the VM gives you the exact environment that they use in the videos (for ToDo list application at least, NOT the basic RoR application, which uses Rails 3.1).

James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points
James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points

There are a lot of reason to develop in a VM, here's a list: http://fideloper.com/develop-in-vm

Some of the highlights:

  • No fear of an OS upgrade breaking Git. No wasted time ** fixing Mac OS oddities. No time wasted on Brew.
  • Your development environment is your production environment.
  • Projects can be separate
Bradan Jackson
Bradan Jackson
20,558 Points
Bradan Jackson
Bradan Jackson
20,558 Points

I would assume that they are using this VM due to the version changes that are frequently made to the rails installer packages, and they cannot continuously update their courses to be up to date with the latest version.

I'm not sure about you, but I had a few differences between the version of Rails that I installed and the version they were showing in the video.