Coming soon ... a Rails Virtual Applicance

Rails
1

For those of you interested in such things, I am building a VMWare
virutal
machine with a complete LAMP stack plus Rails. The project is set up in
Rubyforge at http://rubyforge.org/projects/vgrails/. There’s not much
there
yet, but I expect to have something ready for folks to test towards the
12th of
April, 2006. The project name is “vgrails”, which stands for VMWare +
Gentoo +
Rails.

What’s in it?

  1. A VMWare virtual machine. It will be distributed as a ZIP archive and
    will be
    posted on the VMWare community virtual appliance site as soon as it’s
    done. My
    guess is that the ZIP file will be about CD-sized and the unzipped
    virtual
    machine will be about 1.5 GB, but I don’t have all the details yet.

  2. Gentoo Linux 2006.0. There will be as much “testing” stuff in it as I
    can
    get, so I will definitely want people to break it.

  3. Apache 2 and fastcgi

  4. MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite3. I’m not planning to put the PHP-based
    web
    admin tools in it, but I’m open to advice to the contrary. unixODBC is
    definitely in, however.

  5. Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby and their Apache modules

  6. Subversion, CVS and Trac for version control

  7. rrdtool for performance counter logging and analysis

  8. Rails. Right now I am expecting Rails 1.1.1 to show up in Gentoo very
    soon,
    which is the only piece I’m waiting for.

  9. Numerous Gentoo utilities, including the utility that makes Live
    install CDs.
    I’m holding off on adding a desktop until I see how big everything is
    going to
    get, but it will probably end up having X and one of the lighter Window
    managers, and if I can stuff it in, VNC. If it gets a desktop it will
    also get
    R, since a number of the Ruby folks are interested in R interfaces to
    Ruby. R
    itself is fairly small.

I’m hoping to get it on line as soon as possible, because a few people
have
asked me to put together something like this so they can enter the
VMWare
Virtual Appliance challenge with a Rails application. This is not going
to be
my entry in the challenge, although everything in it will appear in my
entry. I
don’t know at this point if I will even use Rails in my entry, since I’m
not at
all an expert with it yet.

Ed Borasky

2

Hi Ed ~

I have seen some others working on this, and have set up a Debian VMware
machine myself. I like the choice of Gentoo as that is what all of my
production servers run. I would suggest Lighttpd instead of Apache. It
has
a much smaller footprint than Apache. I bet with some optimization you
could really drop the size of the download as well. I guess I am really
describing what I would want, vgrails light with only MySQL for a DB. :wink:

Anyhow just my 2 cents…

~ Ben

3

Quoting Ben R. [email protected]:

Hi Ed ~

I have seen some others working on this, and have set up a Debian VMware
machine myself. I like the choice of Gentoo as that is what all of my
production servers run. I would suggest Lighttpd instead of Apache. It has
a much smaller footprint than Apache. I bet with some optimization you
could really drop the size of the download as well. I guess I am really
describing what I would want, vgrails light with only MySQL for a DB. :wink:

Anyhow just my 2 cents…

I forgot about lighttpd … I’ll add it, but I can’t imagine dropping
Apache.
There may be a non-Rails component or two coming in as well.

Right now the download looks like about 1.5 GB uncompressed and .75 GB
compressed. Once I get everything loaded, I’ll look at the sizes of
things. For
example, I’m pretty much forced to carry Perl and Python, but I don’t
necessarily need PHP. I think trac requires PHP, so dropping trac might
lighten
it up a bit.

I can’t think of a compelling reason for both MySQL and PostgreSQL, but
if one
of them had to go, MySQL is the one I would drop because I have zero
experience
with it. For now I think I want them both, even if it means killing some
other
sacred cow.