I’ve been using vagrant to set up ruby on rails project environment, which is best practice in my opinion. One can perfectly and easily have a clean envrionment, in my case, ubuntu64 to put the whole rails server in while coding in familiar platform using favourite editor.

Usually, I would type in shell the following commands

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vagrant up
vagrant ssh
cd <project folder>
rails s

the server is up and I can open Chrome on MacOS and type in [project-name].dev:3000 to have a look at the website under development. [project-name].dev is an alias to the IP address of the virtual machine. It’s all beautiful.

However, when I set up a new project today as usual and open up a browser, the server did not respond.

At first I thought it was the rails’s problem. So I tried to connect to the server locally with telnet.

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telnet localhost 3000
GET / HTTP/1.0
Content-Type:text/html; charset=UTF-8

which performed perfectly.

It turns out that when I http request [project-name].dev:3000, the server received nothing at all. Though I still don’t get what’s different from the previous ones, I forced the server listen to the ip address on start up and the problem is solved.

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rails s -b 192.168.34.34

The server listens to http://localhost:3000 by default, then the problem is how the previous ones worked… LOL

Step by Step

Step 1

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mkdir <project name>   
cd <project name>
vagrant init ubuntu/trusty64
vagrant up

Step 2

Change the memory size, which is necessary for developing.
We also give the virtual machine a fixed IP address for convenience.
Modify Vagrantfile with your favourite editor, adding the following lines.

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config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |v|
  v.memory = 2048
end
config.vm.network :private_network, ip: "192.168.33.33"

and then

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vagrant reload

More for IP address,

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sudo vim /etc/hosts

and add

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192.168.33.33 <project name>.dev

Step 3

Time for installing rails.

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vagrant ssh

and type in following lines one by one

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sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y git-core curl zlib1g-dev build-essential \
                     libssl-dev libreadline-dev libyaml-dev libsqlite3-dev sqlite3 \
                     libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev software-properties-common

Install rbenv, which is a tool for installing ruby and version control of ruby.

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cd 
git clone git://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv.git .rbenv
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'eval "$(rbenv init -)"' >> ~/.bashrc
git clone git://github.com/sstephenson/ruby-build.git ~/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
exec $SHELL

Now is ruby

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rbenv install 2.1.2
rbenv global 2.1.2

Next is rails

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echo "gem: --no-ri --no-rdoc" > ~/.gemrc

This is for simplicity.

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gem install rails -v 4.1.2
rbenv rehash

Now database.

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sudo apt-get install mysql-server  mysql-client  libmysqlclient-dev

Environment ready!

Reference