There is nothing better than the convenience of a web server on your local machine when developing web applications. Fortunately for us there are several projects that make it real easy to setup a local web server.
WAMP: Stands for Windows, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. You can probably guess that these are the items you get when installing WAMP. What you may not know is the great little install package and the ease of setting up your web server. WAMP setups up a little executable that will start and stop the web server. You also have the option to restart any of the services from within a system tray menu. WAMP also has several add ons you can download, my favorite being the ability to switch back and forth between PHP 4 and PHP 5.
Instant Rails: I have been waiting for the WAMP project to add Ruby on Rails support, maybe making it WAMPR or something. Until that day comes there is a bare bones solution called Instant Rails that will give you Rails on Windows support. There is a little bit of work that needs to be put into setting this up, as it does not come in as nice of a package as WAMP… but gets the job done.
These solutions make it dead easy to setup a local web development server on your local machine. A tip is to keep all paths the same, that way if you syncronize between a laptop and a dekstop machine you do not need t make modifications.
Enjoy the weekend!
There’s a rails live cd available too.
http://www.railslivecd.org/
There is also RadRails (www.radrails.org)
It’s what I personally use at work, but its more or less the same thing as an IDE for Eclipse.
Get Ruby installed, do some gem updates, and this program runs a local server very easily.
I can run 5 projects at the same time just by changing the port (radrails can use mongrel or webrick servers).