Greenshift 07: Setting Up An Environment

So, nothing really all that interesting to write about today. Basically setting up my environment to actually begin testing and building things in the future. I decided to upgrade and revamp my development environment so that I'm using the most up to date stuff so that I do not end up having dependencies and outdated libraries begin to brake on me.

I finally upgraded from Ubuntu 16.04 to Ubuntu 18.04. I probably should have updated that environment a long time ago, but I haven't really cared that much to do so. But if I'm going to start a new project and if I plan on working on it for awhile, then upgrading to the latest and greatest in software isn't the worst move.

After getting my development operating system updated, I moved on to getting Ruby Version Manager and Ruby 2.5 onto my system. My previous environments had Ruby 2.2 and 2.3 respectively and those are getting pretty old, so to continue with the theme of getting shiny new things, I got a shiny version of Ruby. Although apparently Ruby 2.6 has some exciting improvements to performance in store which I'm looking forward to .

Next, I installed node-js which is used within Rails which is a web application framework which uses Ruby to generate a nice structured project which separates different concerns so they are easier to manage. Rails uses the so-called MVC pattern that is popular in application development and something we'll go into a little more detail in future posts. I installed a few gems which are packages in Ruby (including the all-important bundler gem), before installing Rails 5.2 which is a gem itself.

For those that don't do a lot of development in Ruby or development in general, this all might seem really confusing, but after doing a bunch of setups, you get used to it and there are plenty of resources online to help set up Ruby and Rails so you can begin developing web applications using Ruby.

The last thing I did was set up a Git repository on Github for Project Greenshift. As mentioned in the earlier post, the project is open-source and all of the code will be available for anyone to use and build upon as they wish.

One can view the repository here.

Unfortunately, my computer crashed while loading some of the new stuff, so I wasn't able to get to all I wanted to get to today. That's the one issue with development. Lots and lots of troubleshooting. And running into errors. And it only gets worse from here. But perhaps there's the reason it's so fun. There's no better feeling than getting some complex piece of code to finally behave the way that you intended it to.