Essential Ruby on Rails tools for the Ubuntu User

Window’s doesn’t cut it

Ruby on Rails was the straw that broke the camels back for me, and motivated me to switch to Linux on my desktops and laptop. Since then, I’ve tried various tools, but here are a couple of things I wouldn’t like to try to do without.

Editor - Bluefish

Quanta is a close runner up but I find Bluefish to be “the one”.

Why? Well for me an absolutely ESSENTIAL need in a rails editor is a really good directory and file tree in the left nav. It’s great that rails has a place for everything, but let’s face it, rails applications also have lots of files. If I had to click Open and navigate to a file I’d shoot myself.

Bluefish sidebar does a great job of:

• 1) Finding your rails app
• 2) Making it the base directory of the tree
• 3) Allowing you to expand trees as needed

Personally, I find the visibility of files so good that as a general rule, if I can’t see all of the open file tabs without scrolling left or right, I close all files and start again.

Syntax highlighting is great, although you’ll have to add .erb as a ruby extension through the setup.

Feature wish: Multiple rows of open tabs would be nice, but then I’d just get into bad habits again.

MySQL tool - Navicat

I’m a command line kinda guy.. I’ll use a terminal to move files before I drag and drop, but for some reason I’ve never got hooked on command line sql. That’s possibly because in the early days, I found Navicat.

I know that phpmyadmin is somewhat of an industry standard, but personally I hate it! Navicat is a locally installed application, available for Windows, Mac and yes, Linux that for me blows the socks off anything else I’ve tried.

As it’s not running on the host, then there is of course the inconvenience of having to configurating mysql to allow your IP, but it’s worth it. I use both the Linux version, and the Windows version running under wine. Pretty much the same, except I have a Windows license, so that unlocks some extra goodies. I use navicat for:

• Adding sample data
• Fixing data ( not structures of course ) during development
• Administration on live sites ( e.g. flagging that someone has made a donation at Listingly.com )
• Browsing and generally perusing during development
• Backups! One click and you have a local backup of your remote application

Give it a go. 30 day free trial.

Quake style Terminal - Yakuake

Yakuake is a terminal that reveals and hides itself with the F12 key. For some reason, I just like using it for running my development server process in. It’s no different from a terminal window, but it just feels good to me to have it tucked away there.

SSHFS

Yikes, I’m going to reveal my bad habits now.. in that I don’t SVN and I don’t capistrano. I’m a bad person. It’s on the to do list now as I need to work along side my buddy benr75 on some projects, so no doubt I’ll take what he indoctrinates me with and apply it to my own stuff too.

Until then though, SSHFS is the ultimate. SSHFS is a way to mount remote folders as local folders across SSH. In other words, if you have SSH access to your server, you can mount it locally!

My personal setup is that I develop in:

/home/[user]/www/rails_app

and remote mount:

/home/[user]/rrr/rails_app

as the equivilent application on the remote server. I then have a couple of scripts:

getcore [railsapp] and sendcore [railsapp]

which either fetch or send:

/public /app /db

Of course after that I still have to manually run migrations, and restart mongrel processes but for a single developer environment I bet from a purely time efficiency perspective this effort is significantly less than the effort of using SVN.

As an aside, I always use SSHFS all the time when I realize that I have a file at home that I need at work and visa versa.. just open up an obscure port on your firewall and map it to 23 on your machine and you can mount the remote machine as a local folder.

Genius ;-)

XaraLX - In my mind the ultimate grahic design tool

Worthy of a mention as my rails projects would not be what they are without XaraLX. It’s really nothing to do with Rails, but for years and years this has been my tool of choice ( over Photoshop and Illustrator ) for design and implimentation. I cried for joy when I saw that they had an open source project!