Every Flavour Beans

Git is the favourite source code management tool of the Ruby on Rails community these days. Though GNU/Linux or Mac platforms are generally preferred to Windows by Ruby on Rails as well as git communities, I will show you how you can work with these technologies on Windows platform. I will also show how to host a git public/share repository of a Rails application on the Github free web service. Note that the following information applies to any project, not just Rails.

1. Refer to my earlier post to see how to install Ruby on Rails on the Windows platform. You can skip some of the later parts if you wish.

   Setting Up Rails Development Environment on Windows Vista/XP

2. Git still has some issues on the Windows platform but for normal usage the msysgit package shouldn’t let you down. Download and install it from its Google Code page.

   Download msysgit for Windows

   Read the information in last few dialog boxes carefully during the installation and select the settings you prefer. The following screenshots show the settings I have picked when installing msysgit on my system.

   Install a separate git shell in which to run the git commands:

   

   I can go to any git initialized directory, right-click a file and say “Git Bash Here” which will save me a lot of ‘cd’ commands:

   

   Git’s built-in SSH support is more than enough for development purposes:

   

   Now you can just go to any Rails directory and run ‘git init’ there to track the files under git.

   Start Git Bash shell from the Start Menu.
   

   Go to your Rails directory and run the following commands.

   Example session:

   # cd hello
   # ls
   # git init
   # git add .

   For more git commands that you can use, refer to Git Tutorial. To learn more about how Git handles line ending conversions(especially important to Windows users), refer to gitattributes man page.

3. If you are working alone on a particular application or you are just interested in maintaining the history of the source code changes locally, then you might prefer just working with in the project directory. If I want to share the changes with friends/colleagues or the world at large, we need a public git repository. Github and Assembla are but only two examples that have good free packages to get started with.

   Create a new account on Github.

   • Go to github.com
   • Click the link “Pricing and Signup” at the top of the page.
     
   • Pick a package(say “Open source” which is free) and click “Signup” button.
     
   • Fill in the information and click “I agree, sign me up!” button if you agree to all the policies.

   You need to enter your public SSH key when creating a Github account. If you don’t already have SSH keys generated, you can generate one using git tools. Github website has nice explanation on how to go about setting up SSH key on Windows for Github, so just follow the procedure.

   Once you have created the account and are logged in, click the “Create new one” link on the dashboard page, fill in the details and click the “Create Repository” button to create an empty repository on Github.

   

   Now you can push the contents of your Rails directory to the empty git repository that we created on Github in the previous step by running the following command in Git Bash shell:

   # cd hello
   # git remote add origin git@github.com:tabrez/hello.git
   # git push origin master

   Adjust the second command according to your account/project details. Now you can say ‘git push’ from your git tracked directory anytime you want to publish your changes to Github, so that others can pull these changes to their computers and merge them with their local git repository.

   Read more about git push.
   Read more about Github.

I will try to write about more tools that help in being more productive with development with Rails in future articles.