Setting Up an iMac Pairing Station for Rails Development

I used this post today as a guide on how to get another iMac up and running so I thought it was probably a good point to chuck this up here, if only for our own reference.

We are starting with a 27″ iMac and a base Snow Leopard install.

The first step was to install Xcode from the Snow Leopard disc, you’ll find it in the Optional Installs part of the disc.

Ruby and RubyGems comes with Snow Leopard by default so we’ll use them. You’ll likely need to update the RubyGems system :

    sudo gem update --system

Now we can install Rails :

  sudo gem install rails

This will install the latest stable version of Rails. We need a specific version for some of our applications (until we’ve tested it under the newer version) and you can do this by adding the -v switch :

  sudo gem install rails -v=2.3.4

After this we can switch on Apache and install passenger, the module that runs Rails on Apache. So turn on Web Sharing in the Sharing panel of your System Preferences.

  sudo gem install passenger
  sudo passenger-install-apache2-module

This will compile the Apache module and give you some text to paste into your apache conf file to load it. I keep this in a separate config file in /etc/apache2/other/passenger.conf. It should look something like :

  LoadModule passenger_module /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.8/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
  PassengerRoot /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.8
  PassengerRuby /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby

Next download the Passenger Preference Pane so you can control your Rails sites from the OS X Preferences area. You can get it from http://www.fngtps.com/passenger-preference-pane. You should now be able to run Rails websites on your local machine very easily.

We use Git for our source control and Git X is the best GUI for this on OS X at the moment. You can download Git for OS X from http://code.google.com/p/git-osx-installer/ and you can get GitX from http://gitx.frim.nl/.

I like to use a Pomodoro timer when pairing and the one I like the best for OS X is just called Pomodoro Desktop. It will keep people focussed and also can serve to keep the control swapping in a fairly regular way. You can find out about how Pomodoro works here.

We use Github for our repository and exchange is done via SSH, so you’ll need to generate an SSH key and put that into your Github account.

  ssh-keygen
  cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Copy the output and put that into your public SSH keys in Git Hub.

When pairing with Git the ability to have both parties responsible for the work they’re doing is appreciated sometimes. Especially twelve months from now when you can’t remember why you did something. Not that you don’t comment your code, or always write beautifully understandable code. There is a nice gem called hitch. It comes out of Hashrocket and handles the ‘hitching’ and ‘unhitching’ of partners on a machine. We have a pairing station so generally we just want to change the pair that’s in operation, so it works well. You’ll need to be inside a git repository to do the initial setup. I cloned one of our projects and then you issue :

  hitch -m

Which will prompt you for your main email address, this is the email address that all devs in your team receive, or a group email of some sort.

Now to hitch two devs you’d do :

  hitch dev1 dev2

This will prompt you for names of the dev1 and dev2 users so that they’ll be displayed in your commit. It’ll also associate your commits to the email address devs+dev1+dev2@company.com if you setup devs@company.com as the email address when you issued the hitch -m command. If you setup gravatars for all your devs+user1+user2@company.com email addresses then you’ll get a nice picture in Github too.

I think that’s about it really. We obviously just install gems as required and make customisations on a per developer need. We generally use Textmate for editing so this means installing a theme (we use the Railscast theme) and the relevant bundles for Rspec, Haml and Sass.