Ruby Development in Windows Revisited

Some time ago I wrote about how I set up my machine so I could program hassle-free in Ruby while running Windows. It was more of a reminder to myself than anything, in case I ever needed to set things up the same way again.

Fast forward to 2015. When a colleague saw my workstation and realized I was running Windows, he was quite surprised and asked me how I was doing it. I thought of pointing him to my old blog post, but I felt that:

• It was outdated (the setup described was from 2012, written in 2014)
• It was incomplete (it’s just a checklist of what I’ve installed)

I’ve improved on the whole setup since, and I thought it’s time to share the whole updated setup so that anyone else interested can benefit.

The Magic of Virtualization

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!

The Wizard of Oz (1939 film)

It’s probably a bit misleading to say I do my Ruby development exclusively on Windows. It’s not because of the graphical user interface or the hardware support; I think Windows 10 has been a great improvement over previous Windows versions. Support for peripherals (like graphics cards, multi-monitor setups, or just [recently](link to follow soon on hackworkplay.com) 4K TVs/monitors) is simply heaps better than that of Ubuntu.

Rather, it’s because the Windows CLI is absolutely horrible. I’ve looked into some projects that attempt to alleviate the pain of the Windows CLI, like PowerShell or Console2, but for me, nothing still beats the power of a Unix TTY.

The easiest way to combine the two worlds is to run Ubuntu inside a virtual machine and expose the tools I need to Windows. I get the hardware compatibility and peripheral support of Windows, while also getting the workflow efficiencies of Unix.

Write Once, Run Anywhere

Portability is for people who cannot write new programs.

Linus Torvalds (tongue in cheek)

I chose to use apps that have been “portabilized” because:

• I have many computers
• I like using all of them
• I prefer keeping my stuff synchronized

I’m able to do this by using portable versions of VirtualBox and MobaXterm (an all-in-one remote terminal that comes with an X11 server). I keep my portable MobaXterm in a Dropbox folder; this allows me to sync my settings and bookmarks across all my devices that have Dropbox installed. For VirtualBox, I keep the files on a USB 3.0 portable drive.

During the VirtualBox setup, I prefer to separate my home drive and my OS drive; this preference saved me a lot of time and effort in the recent past. Previously, I ran my VirtualBox server with the full Ubuntu Gnome GUI (I use Ubuntu Gnome because it has a version of gnome-terminal that can reflow text, something Mac terminals have had since forever) full-screen. I’m now running a basic Ubuntu Server installation, with all my applications forwarded over X11.

Since I’ve separated my OS drive from my home drive, I can create a new VirtualBox VM with a fresh OS drive and reuse the same home drive as before. All my local settings and repositories are immediately available.

Setting it all up

It takes these very simple-minded instructions–“Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it’s greater than this other number’–but executes them at a rate of, let’s say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic.”

Steve Jobs (playboy magazine interview, on “what a computer is”)

I’m using a portable version of VirtualBox. If you’ve made any VMs with VirtualBox before, the experience is mostly the same. Currently I’m running Ubuntu Server 15.10, but there’s nothing preventing you from running a full-blown Ubuntu installation with all the desktop environment bells and whistles. I just prefer a cleaner and more precise installation that allows me to choose the exact packages I want and need.

VM Creation

I separated my home and os drives by installing them on different virtual hard drives. I gave the os disk 40 GB of fixed allocation and the home partition 80 GB of dynamic allocation. I figured that since the OS would be used a lot more than the user-owned files, the tiny bit of extra performance I’d get from preallocating disk space on the physical hard drive would be worth it.

I also gave the VM 8 GB of RAM. Since I’ll be installing Ubuntu Server on the VM, 8 GB is more than enough memory for my needs (since there’s no GUI or desktop environment). So far I haven’t had to increase the memory allocation, and I can comfortably run the VM alongside huge Excel sheets and some Steam games.

If I do need to increase the memory size, it’s just a matter of:

• shutting the VM down
• changing the memory size in the settings
• booting the VM back up

Clipboard

I set clipboard sharing to be bidirectional; that allows me to copy and paste between the VM and the host seamlessly, as though they’re normal native applications on the host. I disable Drag’n’Drop, though; I never really found much use for it.

Port forwarding

As a web (and Ruby on Rails) developer, I use custom ports to run my web servers and preview my work. Common ports I use are 3000 (Rails), 1313 (Hugo), and 22 (SSH). It’s very easy to add more port forwards, and better still, it’s almost instantaneous. There really isn’t much issue if you don’t set up your port forwards at this point; you can always add more later.

If you’re running a full desktop environment, you can get away with not port-forwarding 22 to the host. However, since I’ll be using X11 forwarding, I need to have 22 port-forwarded.

Shared folders

I prefer sharing my Dropbox folder with the VM instead of my full Documents folder. I feel that since I’m sharing files between two local machines anyway, I might as well share the files with all of my machines through Dropbox.

VirtualBox makes it really easy to share folders between the host and the client.

Add yourself to the vboxsf group to be able to access the shared folder without having superuser privileges:

sudo adduser `whoami` vboxsf

Then, you can either log out and log back in (which is annoying) or just force the OS to recognize the new members of the group:

sudo newgrp vboxsf

You now have access to the shared folder in /media/sf_Dropbox/ (if you followed my preference of sharing the Dropbox folder; otherwise the folder name will be different). I like doing a symlink of that shared folder to my home:

sudo ln -s /media/sf_Dropbox/ ./

That just makes everything easier since I have the same folder structure on my [Dell XPS 13 (2015)](link to follow soon), which runs almost exclusively on Ubuntu Gnome.

Packages

Chosen for minimalist reasons (except for gnome-terminal, which was chosen because it does text reflow)

• xvfb
• gnome-terminal
• rox-filer
• eog (eye of gnome)

Additional quality-of-life packages

• sublime-text
• gnome-tweak-tool

X11 forwarding

Here comes the magic where I get seamless interaction between the VM applications and the host’s native applications. In a nutshell, I run an X server in Windows (currently Cygwin, but XMing will also do) and have it display the applications running inside the VM.

Getting all the applications running would be a chore, so I turn to MobaXterm to provide me with almost everything I need for this setup. Instead of getting PuTTY + XMing + configuration, I just bookmark my SSH connection to the VM, and that’s it.

Note that for this to work you’ll need to have the SSH port in your VM (22 in my case) forwarded to the host.

Caveats

Caveat emptor /ˌkævɛɑːt ˈɛmptɔr/ is Latin for “Let the buyer beware” (from caveat, “may he beware”, the subjunctive of cavere, “to beware” + emptor, “buyer”).

Wikipedia

Although I’m very happy with this setup and have been using it for both my work and home workstations for years now, there are still a number of niggling issues that I haven’t quite resolved due to a lack of time or knowledge.

Response lag

Depending on the application,

Multi-tasking preview in Windows 10

Hardware accelerated OpenGL