Is it possible to 'clone' my Rails development machine?

Question

I just began the process of setting up a new Mac as a Rails development machine, but the thought occurred to me: do I have to do all this again from scratch or can I somehow copy/clone my development environment from my existing machine (also a Mac).

Could I, for example, clone my machine using SuperDuper? Or are there any other tools to make the process of developing from more than one machine less agonizing than manually re-installing databases, Ruby, Rails, etc?

Thanks in advance for any ideas.

Answer 1

The rails framework itself is designed to be highly portable, especially version 3 ( with the introduction of a tool called bundler ), it lets you package all of your code and dependencies very easily which makes redeploying elsewhere simple.

Also you could look into using a tool such as RVM for managing ruby installations, RVM makes it very easy to deploy new versions of ruby into any environment.

http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/

And bundler:

http://gembundler.com/

The whole ethos of Ruby and Rails is based around portability and transparency. Once you start developing with it you start to see how easy it is to redeploy your app to other environments.

If you use a distributed version control system like git, you'll be able to pull down a copy of your application to any machine connected to the web.

Capistrano is also something you might want to look at, its a deployment tool and if you couple it with a version control tool such as git, you have a very powerful combination for pushing updates/changes to your deployed application

Answer 2

You can use Carbon Copy Cloner (http://www.bombich.com/) to copy your HD to another, which you can boot from. Also, if you use TimeMachine on another drive/network drive, then you can restore another machine from the backup.