Rails%203%20In%20Action

Server setup
up and running. Vagrant will allow you to download an operating system image and
then set up VirtualBox in an exceptionally easy fashion.
To install VirtualBox, you must first download it from http://virtualbox.org and
install it like a normal program. 12 After that, you need to install the vagrant gem,
which you can do by running this command:
gem install vagrant
Now that you’ve got VirtualBox and Vagrant, you can install Ubuntu using Vagrant.
This is the operating system that you’ll use to run your server. This file is pretty large
(over 500MB) and may not be good for some connections. As an alternative, we would
recommend using a VPS, as suggested earlier. This command will download Ubuntu
Lucid Lynx (10.04) which you can use as a perfectly fine base to set up your server:
vagrant box add base http://files.vagrantup.com/lucid32.box
To start up this server, you need to create a new folder called ubuntu (the name isn’t
important and could be anything), where the configuration of your server will be
stored. You can then run vagrant up and vagrant ssh to boot it and connect to it
through SSH. Altogether:
mkdir ubuntu
cd ubuntu
vagrant init
vagrant up
vagrant ssh
The up command will take a couple of minutes to run, but the ssh command should
be instantaneous after that.
NOTE If at any point you wish to shut down your server, you can use the
vagrant halt command.
This is how you connect to servers in the real world, except you would use a command
such as this:
ssh username@some-server.somewhere.com
The vagrant ssh is a good-enough analogy to that. By running vagrant ssh you connect
to your server as the user vagrant. This user has administrative (or more commonly
referred to as root) access on this box, and so you’re able to install the
packages that you need.
If you’re using a non-Vagrant machine, you’ll first need to set up a user for yourself
rather than operating as the root user, as this can be dangerous. 13 To do this, use this
command (replacing user with a username such as ryan):
12 If you’re on Windows XP you may encounter issues where it claims to have not been verified correctly. This
is a known problem. If you skip the errors, it will still work.
13 For example, if you were running a script as the root user and that script attempted to delete the /usr directory,
the command would execute. By executing commands as non-root, you save yourself some potential
damage from malevolent scripts. This is because the user will only have access to some directories, rather than
root, which has access to everything.
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