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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-30T01:36:15+00:00

I’m a developer who uses RoR-CoffeeScript-Sass-Passenger-Apache. We use EC2 for our deployment and we

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I’m a developer who uses RoR-CoffeeScript-Sass-Passenger-Apache. We use EC2 for our deployment and we have Macbook Airs for development. While the rails community is very much Mac-friendly, because of the whole deployment stack difference in dev vs. prod, I’m using a virtualbox+ubuntu while my peers are developing on OS X native.

Having on OS X Native adds more problem as we have more dependencies in the stack (Solr, Beanstalk, Mongodb and more which works well in Ubuntu)

I’m looking for suggestions on how Rails developers using Mac and Amazon EC2 can have their dev and prod environment setup.

Would also like feedback on use of vagrant for distribution of development environments for this use case.

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  1. Editorial Team

    Our team has been been developing on Macs and deploying to Ubuntu on EC2 for three years now with very few issues. Several things have helped make this a smooth process:

    1. We can run the entire app stack** on a Mac. Between macports, homebrew, and building from source when necessary, we have managed to get every piece of technology that we run in prod working on our dev boxes. The way the pieces are configured and fit together is different locally (in prod, for example, we auto-discover our memcached instance, whereas locally it’s hard coded) but every integration can be tested on Macs first before going to prod.

    2. Our continuous build system is on the same setup as our prod boxes. This means if you check in some code that depends on some piece of local magic it’s discovered quickly.

    3. We run a soak (some people call this staging or integ) stack that is configured identically to production. This sometimes causes some development overhead but has so many benefits that it’s well worth it. All code goes through this stack before being pushed to prod.

    This setup has worked well enough that over time we’ve allowed more parts of the setup to drift apart. We used to run passenger locally (like we do in prod) but now use Pow. We regularly experiment with new ruby versions in development for some time before upgrading the rest of the stack.

    I’ve had to develop using a virtualized environment for other projects (OSX + CentOS in VirtualBox) and definitely found it more painful that all-native. For one, it felt like managing two machines instead of one. Everything also felt sloooooowww.

    If there’s a piece of the stack that is painful to run on the Mac, I would definitely prefer to take the hit of either a) spending the time of getting it working locally or b) abstracting that piece away, rather than pay the tax of dealing with a virtual environment.

    ** I’m only including the Rails app and direct dependencies in this discussion. For example, we use puppet to configure our EC2 fleet, but don’t run it on our dev boxes.

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