Wednesday, October 3, 2012

New RubyStack for Ruby On Rails Developers

We are happy to announce a new version of BitNami RubyStack. If you are not familiar with RubyStack, it is a self-contained, easy to use distribution with one goal in mind: to make it simple to get started developing Ruby On Rails applications. BitNami RubyStack is available in the form of free, ready-to-run installers, virtual machine images (VMs) and Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for the Amazon Cloud.

The following versions of BitNami RubyStack are now available on the RubyStack download page:
  • 1.8.7-0:  It ships Ruby 1.8.7 and Rails 2.3.14
  • 1.9.3-0:  with Ruby 1.9.3 and Rails 3.2.8
These Stacks also include RVM, so it is possible to install any Ruby version on top of any of the Stacks. Check our RVM quick guide to know how to install more Ruby versions. In addition to the Ruby runtime and its dependencies, BitNami RubyStack ships the components listed below:

- Apache 2.2.22 with Passenger module
- NGinx 1.3.4 with Passenger module
- MySQL 5.5.21
- Git 1.7.11.3
- Subversion 1.7.5
- Sphinx 2.0.4
- SQLite 3.7.10
- Memcached 1.4.13
- Varnish 3.0.1
- DevKit for Windows
- PHP and phpMyAdmin (optional)

To simplify the process even more, RubyStack also installs and configures most popular Ruby gems:

- Bundler
- MySQL
- SQLite
- Nokogiri
- Passenger
- RMagick
- Mongrel and Thin
- and more.

One of the improvements in this version of RubyStack is that the dependencies for gems that require compilation are already bundled and pre-configured so they will run out of the box. If you need a different version of one of the gems, you can run the "bundle install" command and it will be automatically download, compile and install the gem in your RubyStack.

In addition, we have also been working on improving our documentation. There is a new Quick Start Guide that addresses the most common questions that we get about BitNami RubyStack. You will also find a step-by-step guide on how to create your first Ruby On Rails project on top of RubyStack. For more advanced users, you can will also find information on how to deploy your application with Passenger in production environments.

Welcome page


In addition to BitNami Stacks, we provide simplified deployment and management of Ruby on Rails development environments in the cloud with BitNami Cloud Hosting. Sign up for our free developer plan to check it out!