Ideal setup for Ruby on Rails on Windows (Vagrant + Guard + Spring)

If you’re developing Ruby on Rails applications in Windows, you’ve probably found that tests run really slowly in the Windows environment. The only supported system to speed up tests is Spork and this hasn’t been updated in about a year or so. The ideal setup for any Windows developer is to develop in your host machine and test in a virtual machine. Vagrant is ideal for  this purpose.

Note: These instructions were written for a Ruby on Rails 4 application. If you are still developing Ruby on Rails 3 applications, the simplest way to get up and running is RailsInstaller.

Install Virtual Box and Vagrant

1. Download and install the latest version of VirtualBox (Vagrant depends on VirtualBox)
2. Download and install the latest version of Vagrant for Windows.

Clone the chef-rails-dev-box repository

1. Download Git for Windows if you haven’t already.
2. Clone chef-rails-dev-box using “git clone https://github.com/AppMaintainers/chef-rails-dev-box.git” to a directory on your machine (I like to install it in the root of my C drive).

Get ready to build and start your virtual machine

1. Download and install the latest version of Ruby 1.9.3.
2. Download and install the latest version of RubyGems.
3. Run ‘gem install rubygems-update’.
4. Download and install the latest DevKit.
5. Modify your PATH environment variable so that you can run ruby and gem directly from your command line.
6. Run ‘gem install bundler’.
7. Build your virtual machine using the instructions from https://github.com/AppMaintainers/chef-rails-dev-box.git.

Set up the database (PostgreSQL)

I like running the development web server on the host machine (for reasons mentioned below). This means that you need to install PostgreSQL on your host machine.

1. Download and install PostgreSQL.

Once you do so, you need to create the development and test users and database on the virtual machine. This can be quite tricky:

1. Make sure that PostgreSQL is running with ‘sudo service postgresql restart’.
2. Before you do anything else, make sure you follow the instructions here in order to make the default encoding of your databases UTF-8.
3. Run ‘sudo su – postgres’.
4. Run ‘createuser <name_of_user> -P -d’ to create a user. You will also be asked to immediately set the user’s password as well.
5. Run ‘psql template1’.
6. Run ‘CREATE DATABASE “<name_of_database>” OWNER <name_of_user>’ to create the development database.

Edit your pg_hba.conf file to look like this. As you can see I have the development and test databases set up to be authenticated via md5:

local all all trust
host all all 127.0.0.1/32 trust
host all all ::1/128 trust
host all all 10.0.0.2/24 trust
local indieinfinity-development indieinfinity md5
local indieinfinity-test indieinfinity md5

Set up continuous (and fast) tests

Finally, we are getting to the whole point of this setup: continuous (and fast) tests.

Currently there are three main solutions for running tests continously:

1. Spork: There has been no development on this project for nearly a year now.
2. Zeus: Zeus does not seem to currently work with Vagrant on Windows.
3. Guard + Spring: This is the ideal solution when using Vagrant on Windows.

In order to get started with Guard + Spring:

Add the following code to your Gemfile:

group :development, :test do
  gem 'minitest'
  gem 'rspec', '~> 3.0.0'
  gem 'rspec-rails', '~> 3.0.0'
  gem 'spring'
  gem 'spring-commands-rspec'
end

group :guard do
  gem 'guard'
  gem 'guard-rails'
  gem 'guard-rspec', '~> 4.2.7'
end

• Run ‘bundle install’ in the root of your project.
• Run ‘bundle exec spring binstub –all’.
• Run ‘sudo gem update –system’ and ‘gem pristine –all’ in order to run spring efficiently.
• Make sure that ‘bin/rspec’ works before you continue further.
• Run ‘bundle exec guard -p’ in order to start Guard. -p specifies polling which is needed for this setup in order for Guard to detect changes to files.

My Guardfile

# A sample Guardfile
# More info at https://github.com/guard/guard#readme

guard 'rspec', cmd: 'bundle exec spring rspec' do
 watch(%r{^spec/.+_spec\.rb$})
 watch(%r{^lib/(.+)\.rb$}) { |m| "spec/lib/#{m[1]}_spec.rb" }
 watch('spec/spec_helper.rb') { "spec" }

 # Rails example
 watch(%r{^app/(.+)\.rb$}) { |m| "spec/#{m[1]}_spec.rb" }
 watch(%r{^app/(.*)(\.erb|\.haml)$}) { |m| "spec/#{m[1]}#{m[2]}_spec.rb" }
 watch(%r{^app/controllers/(.+)_(controller)\.rb$}) { |m| ["spec/routing/#{m[1]}_routing_spec.rb", "spec/#{m[2]}s/#{m[1]}_#{m[2]}_spec.rb", "spec/acceptance/#{m[1]}_spec.rb"] }
 watch(%r{^spec/support/(.+)\.rb$}) { "spec" }
 watch('config/routes.rb') { "spec/routing" }
 watch('app/controllers/application_controller.rb') { "spec/controllers" }

 # Capybara request specs
 watch(%r{^app/views/(.+)/.*\.(erb|haml)$}) { |m| "spec/requests/#{m[1]}_spec.rb" }

 # Turnip features and steps
 watch(%r{^spec/acceptance/(.+)\.feature$})
 watch(%r{^spec/acceptance/steps/(.+)_steps\.rb$}) { |m| Dir[File.join("**/#{m[1]}.feature")][0] || 'spec/acceptance' }
end

guard 'rails' do
 watch('Gemfile.lock')
 watch(%r{^(config|lib)/.*})
end

Troubleshooting

• Update all gems: Make sure that all gems are updated to their latest version (Run ‘bundle update’).
• Certificate issues: If you get an error like ‘SSL_connect returned=1 errno=0 state=SSLv3 read server certificate B: certificate verify failed (OpenSSL::SSL::SSLError)’, you need to follow these instructions.
• Git permission issues: If you get an error like ‘Permission denied (publickey)’ or ‘Could not open a connection to your authentication agent.’ when trying to clone the GitHub repository, you need to add your key to ssh-agent. Run eval “$(ssh-agent -s)” and ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa’ in a Git Bash command prompt.
• Bundle install fails: Run ‘sudo bundle install’ instead.
• CPU usage is at 100%: Run bundle exec guard -p -l 10 (Change latency to prevent 100% CPU usage). This introduces a latency to how often Guard polls your files to detect changes.
• RubyMine’s autosave kicks in every time a change is made: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11996124/is-it-impossible-to-use-guard-with-rubymine
• Re-associate vagrant with an existing Virtual Machine: https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/issues/1755

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