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Ruby on Rails, Cygwin, and Git part 1
By Jacob Cohen | May 9, 2008
This is the first of what will probably become a series on using Ruby on Rails under Cygwin, with source control managed by Git. This might raise a couple of questions, which I will attempt to answer here.
- Why Ruby on Rails? It provides a nice break from the Java and Perl development I normally do.
- Why Cygwin? My home machine runs Windows XP, but I can’t imagine starting any development without having access to find, grep, the bourne shell, and all of the other utilities I use all the time.
- Why Git? It doesn’t require a central server somewhere. Since it runs locally, switching between branches is lightning fast. Also, it doesn’t preclude the use of other source control systems. It will happily coexist with CVS or Subversion, or (with a little more effort) Perforce.
As for getting it all running, I’ve covered that in a previous post.
For now, I’ll just cover the basics of getting a Rails project started under Cygwin, using Git for source control.
First, I’ll create the directory which will hold the rails application, git repository, and everything else I’m working on. Then, I’ll initialize a git repository, and see that everything is working.
cohen@ceres ~ $ mkdir paste cohen@ceres ~ $ cd paste cohen@ceres ~/paste $ git init Initialized empty Git repository in .git/ cohen@ceres ~/paste $ git status # On branch master # # Initial commit # nothing to commit (create/copy files and use "git add" to track)
As you may have guessed, I’m going to be using my Nopaste application as a project, rewritten using Ruby on Rails. Next, I’ll run rails to initialize my project and check what Git thinks has changed. (Note: I originally had an issue under Cygwin where rails couldn’t read from /dev/urandom, but I was able to get around it by removing the :urandom entry from the GENERATORS line in the random generator file. Running rails -t will print a backtrace on errors so it’s easy to find the right files to tinker with.)
cohen@ceres ~/paste
$ rails .
exists
create app/controllers
create app/helpers
create app/models
... snip ...
create log/production.log
create log/development.log
create log/test.log
cohen@ceres ~/paste
$ git status
# On branch master
#
# Initial commit
#
# Untracked files:
# (use "git add …” to include in what will be committed)
#
# README
# Rakefile
# app/
# config/
# doc/
# log/
# public/
# script/
# test/
nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use “git add” to track)
Git is saying it has noticed a bunch of new stuff that it currently isn’t tracking. We need to get this stuff into our Git repository. I’ll do that, then commit it all onto the master branch.
cohen@ceres ~/paste $ git add * cohen@ceres ~/paste $ git status # On branch master # # Initial commit # # Changes to be committed: # (use "git rm --cached…” to unstage) # # new file: README # new file: Rakefile # new file: app/controllers/application.rb # new file: app/helpers/application_helper.rb … snip … # new file: script/runner # new file: script/server # new file: test/test_helper.rb # cohen@ceres ~/paste $ git commit -m “Generated an initial Rails project” Created initial commit cf547ba: Generated an initial Rails project 43 files changed, 8339 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) create mode 100644 README create mode 100644 Rakefile create mode 100644 app/controllers/application.rb create mode 100644 app/helpers/application_helper.rb … snip … create mode 100755 script/runner create mode 100755 script/server create mode 100644 test/test_helper.rb
Now I can test my new rails project and see what I get.
cohen@ceres ~/paste $ ruby script/server => Booting WEBrick... => Rails application started on http://0.0.0.0:3000 => Ctrl-C to shutdown server; call with --help for options [2008-05-09 00:56:59] INFO WEBrick 1.3.1 [2008-05-09 00:56:59] INFO ruby 1.8.6 (2007-03-13) [i386-cygwin] [2008-05-09 00:56:59] INFO WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=3012 port=3000 127.0.0.1 - - [09/May/2008:00:57:01 GMT-8:00] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 7557 - -> / 127.0.0.1 - - [09/May/2008:00:57:01 GMT-8:00] "GET /javascripts/prototype.js HTTP/1.1" 200 125605 http://localhost:3000/ -> /javascripts/prototype.js 127.0.0.1 - - [09/May/2008:00:57:01 GMT-8:00] "GET /javascripts/effects.js HTTP/1.1" 200 38916 http://localhost:3000/ -> /javascripts/effects.js 127.0.0.1 - - [09/May/2008:00:57:01 GMT-8:00] "GET /images/rails.png HTTP/1.1" 200 1787 http://localhost:3000/ -> /images/rails.png
Next, I’ll start using branches to make some modifications, such as creating my database configuration.
Topics: General |
May 9th, 2008 at 2:03 am
[…] Rafblog wrote an interesting post today on Ruby on Rails, Cygwin, and Git part 1Here’s a quick excerptMy home machine runs Windows XP, but I can’t imagine starting any development without having access to find, grep, the bourne shell, and all of the other utilities I… […]
June 3rd, 2008 at 3:17 pm
I’m another Rails/Cygwin guy. That /dev/urandom problem was a bug in Ruby. There’s a newer version of Ruby in Cygwin’s repo that should not have that problem.
Now if only Ruby would run faster on Cygwin…it’s pretty slow, but still usable.
BTW if you like Cygwin for grepping, give ‘ack’ a try: http://petdance.com/ack/