Best OS for Ruby Dev/Best OS for Ruby Hosting

[Rawn027]

Which is the best OS to use for ruby development...My vote goes to Mac
OS X?

What would be considered the best environment for hosting ruby and
rails? Mac? FreeBSD? Gentoo?

 

[Timothy Goddard]

Ruby is, I believe, primarily designed for use with Linux, although the
code is highly portable. Since Linux is the primary development
platform, it may also have the fastest bug fixing and the most thorough
testing. As a result, your best bet for hosting would be a server-grade
Linux OS such as RHEL, CentOS, or the server versions of other
distributions.

For development, consistency with your hosting platform may or may not
be a concern. You can probably use anything here, but if your rails app
relies on some more advanced libraries you may be best off with linux
again, as package management makes that side of things much simpler and
you can ensure that both are running exactly the same libraries.

Other similar unices such as BSDs are also likely to work well. Mac OS
X would OK as well.

 

[Mauricio Fernández]

Which is the best OS to use for ruby development...My vote goes to Mac
OS X?

matz uses Debian ;-)

 

[Edwin van Leeuwen]

I'd recommend staying away from Gentoo: I prefer
source-based OSs, but Gentoo just breaks too often for it to be worth
it. Also, Gentoo users are on the whole jerkyer and less helpful than
normal people.

I can't help to defend gentoo here a bit. I've been using gentoo for two
years now and in my experience it doesn't break often, but YMMV. The
main pro about gentoo is its users and support. The forums are just
amazing and people are generally very helpful. I know some people who
use other distros, but they often first turn to the gentoo forums for
help etc. Of course I have no experience with gentoo people in
mailinglists and irc. They may all be jerks there.

(Sorry couldn't help but defend them a little )

 

[Austin Ziegler]

Which is the best OS to use for ruby development...My vote goes to Mac
OS X?

Which OS do you find best for development? That will give you your
answer.

I develop PDF::Writer entirely on Windows. When I get around to
purchasing a MacOS X laptop, I will probably shift my development of
PDF::Writer to the Mac (or it might be both Mac and Win since I'm
planning on getting a macintel). I find that I develop for the Ruby
platform.

[...]

Ruby is, I believe, primarily designed for use with Linux, although
the code is highly portable.

I'm not sure that's true. In fact, I think it would be fair to say that
no, Ruby is not "primarily designed for use with Linux". It is designed
as a cross-platform language. Debian Linux is Matz's primary development
environment and there are a lot of Linux users, but the "many eyeballs"
theory definitely applies, as bugs with AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Windows,
Mac OS X, FreeBSD and less popular platforms get noticed relatively
quickly, even if they aren't necessarily fixed quickly because of
developers' limited access to some of those boxes.

Indeed, I will be adding new features to the Windows implementation of
Ruby in the not-too-distant future because I have access to that as a
development platform.

By and large, though, I personally would prefer to run on FreeBSD or
MacOS X than any version of Linux, but especially Debian. I know Matz
uses Debian, but there have been quality issues with Debian's Ruby
support in the past and while the current situation is *better*, it's
still not (IMO) good enough.

I have a great time developing Ruby on both OS X and FreeBSD. I don't
happen to have any Linux boxen at the moment, but last time I did, it
worked really well.

For me, any system that has vim and a ruby installation is ideal.

Precisely!

-austin

 

[Caleb Tennis]

I can't help to defend gentoo here a bit. I've been using gentoo
for two
years now and in my experience it doesn't break often, but YMMV. The
main pro about gentoo is its users and support. The forums are just
amazing and people are generally very helpful. I know some people who
use other distros, but they often first turn to the gentoo forums for
help etc. Of course I have no experience with gentoo people in
mailinglists and irc. They may all be jerks there.

Thanks. As a Gentoo maintainer for Ruby, I'll chime in and say that
I actively read this list. I can't speak for other parts of the
distribution, but at I can at least safely say that Gentoo is a great
development platform for Ruby.

Caleb

 

[Rawn027]

Calab, I would like to comment on that I have been fussing around with
gentoo for quite some time now. What WM do you use? I will currently
just be using it on AMD Sempron with 512MB RAM. I really dont have
heavy iron but not really heavy iron is needed for this application
just for development and hosting on the same box. I am going to check
out using Gentoo. What editor on gentoo do you use for development.
Also do you use lighttpd with fcgi?

 

[Caleb Tennis]

Calab, I would like to comment on that I have been fussing around with
gentoo for quite some time now. What WM do you use? I will currently
just be using it on AMD Sempron with 512MB RAM. I really dont have
heavy iron but not really heavy iron is needed for this application
just for development and hosting on the same box. I am going to check
out using Gentoo. What editor on gentoo do you use for development.
Also do you use lighttpd with fcgi?

For development, I run a minimal KDE desktop and use the Kate text
editor for most of my work. That and a combination of nano.

For rails work, I have a few machines with lighttpd and fcgi and a
one running apache2. For what it's worth, my rails development
server is a Pentium 3 with 128 MB ram running lighttpd.

I'll also admit that I use Textmate on an OS X Powerbook via tunneled
ssh connections to work on stuff from home.

Caleb

 

[William Ramirez]

------=_Part_16256_9178875.1132414828542
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Disposition: inline

I've personally grown comfortable with using Windows as a development
platform, provided that I have my copy of VMware installed. I use FreeBSD a=
s
my VM 'server', not for any specific technical reasons but because it's wha=
t
I'm most comfortable with. Sprinkle in a little samba, add subversion to
taste, and I end up with a little developement system that works well for
me.

------=_Part_16256_9178875.1132414828542--

 

[Rick Nooner]

Which OS do you find best for development? That will give you your
answer.

I think this is the best answer that I've seen. I use Ruby on Mac OS X,
Solaris 2.6, 2.8 and 10, various versions of OpenBSD on Intel and Sparc.
It doesn't work (because of no shared library support) on OpenBSD Vax.

One of the real benefits of Ruby is how well it works cross platform.
I can develop on any of these platforms and have no problems with the
code on any of the other platforms.

Rick

 

[Gregory Brown]

I prefer source-based OSs, but Gentoo just breaks too often for it to be worth
it. Also, Gentoo users are on the whole jerkyer and less helpful than
normal people.

Oh... That's not biased! Says one of those Gentoo jerks. ;_

Seriously though, I have had no trouble whatsoever running and hosting
RoR stuff on Gentoo. I've been using Gentoo for about 4 years and have
yet to have an issue.

From my experience, between windows 2000 / xp / gentoo / debian /
ubuntu / mac os X.3 / X.4 / FreeBSD, i've had very little problems
with any of them, and I frequent most of them each week.

Of the above, if I had to pick a couple, I'd pick gentoo / debian /
and freebsd, with gentoo being my number one pick, but any of the
above work fairly well for development.

For hosting, I'd say a source based *nix is a the way to go. Gentoo
or otherwise, it helps with performance and tweaking.

I agree with someone who said anywhere vim and a ruby interpreter
resides is an ideal development environment. Windows is even (almost)
tolerable via MSys and MinGW (if you have no other options).

 

[zdennis]

Which is the best OS to use for ruby development...My vote goes to Mac
OS X?

What would be considered the best environment for hosting ruby and
rails? Mac? FreeBSD? Gentoo?

I've coded for ruby on Windows 2000, XP, Debian, Ubuntu and OSX. For generic ruby code not specified
on a certain framework or platform-specfic library I find they all work fine (unless you're OSX
machine only has a one-button mouse). I use Eclipse as my IDE when running in GUI and nano as my
text editor when ssh'ing or running a terminal. Eclipse allows you to use any platform and feel righ
at home in development, since it's the same across the board.

For doing rails work I have recently moved to Ubuntu systems for full-time development although my
windows xp laptop still gets use on a regular basis. I work with RHEL 4 quality-assurance and
production servers, so I may be partially bias to running on a linux environment to try to keep a
closer consistency to the setup that the servers have.

If you do any MySQL on windows due note that for development it may be fine, but MySQL seems to run
considerably slower on windows then on a *nix box (if you consider running production on windows).

As my *nix know-how has drastically gone up over the past few years I find myself doing quicker work
in a *nix environment then on windows. Some things I've found that directly and indirectly help that
are:
- great virtual desktop support (yes you can get it for windows but it isn't as good imo)
- tabbed-based console apps, like xterm, gnome-terminal, etc...
- virtual tty support (alt-f1, alt-f2, etc...)
- some *nix/bsd distro's have great support for downloading package/applications as they are
needed. (on windows i found myself googling way to much, it's easier to type apt-get install
i_need_this_package)

But I'm with Austin...what works for you will be best for you!

Zach

 

[anibalrojas]

Most of my experience is based on Rails development, I develop under
W2K and deploy under Fedora. I would recommend to stick to *.nix, many
libraries are just wrappers and it looks like the Windows based one are
not the most compatible, the dll stuff is always annoying (in general
terms) and I have found a lot of weird problems problems running the
apps under Windows (crashes, memory leaks) that just don't happen under
*nix.

 

[Paulus Esterhazy]

Which is the best OS to use for ruby development...

I've coded for ruby on Windows 2000, XP, Debian, Ubuntu and OSX.

Ubuntu combines Debian's wealth of packages with a higher degree of ease
of use - it's certainly a very nice development platform.

Be aware, however, that Ubuntu 5.10 (breezy) ships a broken preliminary
version of ruby 1.8.3*. If you want to debug threaded apps, you'll need
to compile your own ruby.

Cheers,
Paulus

[*] see http://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=17415

 

[Trans]

Heretix

 

[Jeff Wood]

Also, remember that there are still a large number of us *ix users
that prefer to roll our own, and regardless of the packaging system
provided by the OS, I'm gonna go get & compile for myself... I prefer
things that way... Then I know what I have and where I've put it.

I've never had a lick of trouble with a system I setup this way... my
mileage with OS provided packages, unfortunately don't hold that same
quality.

...

j.

Lots of people happen to like FreeBSD for its Ruby support. One of its
major system utilities, portupgrade, is written in Ruby, so that's one
neat aspect. I'd recommend staying away from Gentoo: I prefer
source-based OSs, but Gentoo just breaks too often for it to be worth
it. Also, Gentoo users are on the whole jerkyer and less helpful than
normal people.

(I'd like to start out by apologizing first, gentlemen. this is
certainly off-topic, but needs to be said)

Well Jacob, you succeed in communicating four things in your reply here.

1. you say Gentoo is prone to be broken
2. you say Gentoo users are jerks
3. you say Gentoo users are less helpful
4. you say Gentoo users are not normal

As a Gentoo user, and a Gentoo developer... I'd like to say that I'm
rather disturbed, maybe even slightly offended, at your remarks. We
work hard to make the distribution good. And I'd like to say that the
users bear some responsibility in how well their systems run.

If you want to build your system with an insane set of CFLAGS and USE
flags, then I think problems that result are your own fault.

You say Gentoo users are jerkyer [sic] than other users. I beg to
differ. A jerk is a jerk, and it matters not what distro the said
jerk wants to use. People with the kind of attitude I'm sure you're
referring to are unbecoming to the entire Linux community. Gentoo
does not have the corner on this market, and it's unfair to say so.

Gentoo users are less helpful? I'm sorry, but this is utter crap. It
was this one thing that attracted me to the distribution in the first
place, before any of its technical merits. I can personally vouch for
this. I had a very frustrating experience early on, when I started to
use Gentoo. I kept hitting a wall and was ready to give up. I had
one of the developers help me, personally, to figure out the issues I
was having. This took a period of hours, and I was ready to pay him
for his time. He flatly refused, and asked only one thing in return -
that I never again say I was going to give up on Gentoo. I didn't.
Question - do you think we're less helpful because you come into
#gentoo and ask a question, and don't get an answer *immediately*? If
that's the case, keep in mind it's a VERY busy channel. And try
idling there, and remember... /lastlog is your friend.


By saying Gentoo users are jerkyer [sic] than normal people, you make
us out to be abnormal. Care to explain that one? We're no different
than anyone else. I just enjoy a little more control over my chosen
distribution. Does that make one abnormal? I think not.

Now... on to the Ruby business. Keep in mind, there is admittedly a
bit of bias here, but I'm laying out all the cards. I think Gentoo is
an excellent distribution to host from, and do Ruby work from. It
might require more dedication on your part. Gentoo is hands-on. But
it's really good for people who like to tinker. Good luck.

 

[Jeff Wood]

Oh, and as far as gentoo vs debian vs blah blah blah ...

I've tried to setup a gentoo system for myself and run into troubles,
so, I haven't yet gotten to play with it. I have uses FreeBSD 4, 5, (
and just downloaded ISOs for 6 )... and debian, ubuntu, fedora core,
RHEL WS, and mandrake successfully.

Anyways, there's my $0.02.

j.