Why isn't Vagrant standard practice?

Rails
1

I’m doing my part. My Debian Stable Vagrant box with pre-installed Ruby
on
Rails (https://github.com/jhsu802701/vagrant_debian_wheezy_rvm) is now
part
of my standard operating procedure.

Is there any reason that use of Vagrant is NOT already universal in the
Ruby on Rails community? The issues that Vagrant addresses for me are:

  1. How can you get Ruby on Rails up and running in minutes instead of
    hours WITHOUT Vagrant? At an event like Startup Weekend or a 24-hour
    web
    site challenge, the Drupal, PHP, and Django people can get their
    teammates
    ready to roll in minutes. If you have to install Ruby on Rails without
    Vagrant, the process requires several steps and takes hours. Thanks to
    Vagrant, that will never again delay myself or anyone on my team from
    getting started.
  2. How do you install Ruby on Rails in Windows? Very few Ruby on Rails
    developers use Windows, which makes it hard to get help. Thanks to
    Vagrant, this will never be a problem for myself or anyone I work with,
    because it’s cross-platform.
  3. If RVM behaves in ways that you don’t expect, what do you do? It
    has
    happened to me a few times, though I was able to Google the error
    messages
    and figure out how to fix it. With Vagrant, I can just rebuild the box
    and
    return to original conditions. If you don’t have Vagrant, you may not
    be
    able to do anything in Ruby on Rails until you resolve the issue.
  4. How do you know that your gemspec/Gemfile and setup instructions are
    complete? This has come back to haunt me when I deployed Rails apps or
    published Ruby gems. If you remove dependencies from the
    Gemspec/Gemfile,
    those gems are NOT automatically uninstalled. (And the same goes for
    other
    gems that they pulled in.) Using Vagrant to rebuild my Ruby on Rails
    environment allows me to cover these bases. (And since I keep my
    projects
    in the shared directory, I don’t have to re-download them.)
2

On Thursday, February 5, 2015 at 6:29:00 AM UTC, Jason H., Rubyist
wrote:

I’m doing my part. My Debian Stable Vagrant box with pre-installed Ruby on
Rails (https://github.com/jhsu802701/vagrant_debian_wheezy_rvm) is now part of my
standard operating procedure.

Is there any reason that use of Vagrant is NOT already universal in the Ruby on
Rails community? The issues that Vagrant addresses for me are:

I guess I’ve never felt the need particularly. I haven’t timed myself
but I certainly don’t think it would take hours to install ruby and
rails (and in any event this isn’t something I do frequently). Windows
isn’t a concern for me and while I don’t use rvm anymore I don’t recall
having problems with it. It has been discussed as a way of helping new
developers get started at work

Bundler won’t let you load gems not in your Gemfile, so I am not sure
what your concern is there.

Fred

3

Yeah, it doesn’t take me ‘hours’ to setup a new rails environment. I do
all
my development in a Virtual Machine though - I wouldn’t dev directly on
my
laptop.

Previously I’ve had a Windows 8 laptop with Hyper-V + Ubuntu, now I use
a
Mac with VMware fusion + Ubuntu. Vagrant is certainly useful for some
people, but it doesn’t surprise me it’s not universal as you put it.

On 5 February 2015 at 19:38, Frederick C.
[email protected]

4

Using OSX and ubuntu/linux installing rvm/rbenv followed by rails takes
about 10 minutes - possibly slow download speed and need to compile ruby
might slow it down, but still it is less than 10 lines to copypaste from
rbenv/rvm installation guide…
Vagrant also takes some time to setup… in my case much much more than
installing ruby. And then staring up and configuring vagrant takes some
time too.

Anyways in both cases, installing vagrant or installing ruby and ruby on
rails are initial setup, not something you do every day (hopefully).

For people using windows, yes the setup seems to be harder and might
take
more time, but then you can just have a linux VM running or to use
vagrant.
(Or just install linux)
Or maybe help the community by improving the setup process on Windows
and
start helping others using Windows.

3 ) What if take the effort to fix the issue; and maybe even document it
to
say a blogpost to help the community.

  1. Nor with maven (Java world) etc. or really any other packet manager,
    this can probably be solved by rvm gemsets or just by taking the effort
    of
    sometimes cleaning up installed non wanted gems.
    And often you have multiple projects and the odds are you tend to keep
    using same gems for most of the time… (you really don’t want to
    ‘uninstall’ gem rails, should you accidentally remove it from your
    gemfile.

That being said, it is important to have as easy setup process as
possible
to make it easy for the community to grow.

-Jarmo