Ruby workflow in Windows
- by Rig
I've done some searching and quite haven't come across the answer I am looking for. I do not think this is a duplicate of this question. I believe Windows could be a suitable development environment based on the mix of answers in that question.
I have been developing in Ruby (mostly Rails but not entirely) for about a year now for personal projects on a Macbook Pro however that machine has faced an untimely death and has been replaced with a nice Windows 7 machine. Ruby development felt almost natural on the Mac after doing some research and setting up the typical stack. My environment then included the standard (Linux like) stuff built into OSX, Text Wrangler, Git, RVM, et al. Not too much of a deviation from what the 'devotees' tend to assume.
Now I am setting up my new Windows box for continuing that development. What would my development environment look like? Should I just cave and run Linux in a VM? Ideally I would develop in Windows native. I am aware of the Windows Ruby installer. It seems decent but its not exactly as nice as RVM in the osx/linux world. Mercurial/Git are available so I would assume they play into the stack. Does one develop entirely in Windows? Does one run a webserver in a Linux VM and use it as a test bed while developing in Windows? Do it all in a VM?
What does the standard Windows Ruby developer environment look like and what is the workflow? What would a typical step through be for adding a new feature to an ongoing project and what would the technology stack look like?