Devstep is a relatively new project that I I’ve been working on since February 2014 and had its second release last friday. On its current state, Devstep is a dead simple, no frills development environment builder powered by Docker and the buildpack abstraction that is based around a simple (yet ambitious) goal: I want to git clone and run a single command to hack on any software project. Intrigued? Check out the demo below of my “canonical Discourse example” and read on for more. Read more

There are times that you might need / want to use a specific provider for your Vagrant boxes that differs from VirtualBox or whatever provider you have set on your VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER environmental variable. For experienced Ruby users this might seem something trivial to do but since Vagrant’s community is made of people from many different programming languages background, I thought it would be nice to share this little trick I find useful when I need to make sure the VMs goes up with the right provider. Read more

One of the things I missed the most after going 100% on Vagrant was the ability to preview Rails apps sent mails on my browser. I got used to the awesome letter_opener gem which depends on launchy to fire up a new browser window with the email preview instead of sending. As launchy on its own wouldn’t be able to open up a browser window on the host machine from the guest box, I started to look around for alternatives and wasn’t able to find something else that worked for me. Read more

Last year I heard a lot about Vagrant and even though I had the chance to play with it, performance was always an issue that prevented me from doing 100% of my development work from a VM. By december, when my laptop started acting weird (and eventually died) I decided that my next computer would have as much cores and RAM that I could afford. I looked at a few different options and ended up getting a Dell Inspiron 15R SE with a Core I7 that has 4 cores and 8 threads and 8 Gb RAM. Read more