Recently I was developing a simple application in symfony php. What I liked about it was that it was totally standalone and portable. Everything was installed and stored in the project directory. You can just copy the whole project directory to a different machine supporting php and it works.
I’m wondering if it is possible to achieve the same effect with ruby on rails – to create an application and no longer worry about the rails version and the gems provided by a host.
So, is it possible? And if it is than how to do this?
Yes, in Rails 3 you achieve this via a Gemfile + bundler.
The Gemfile contains your list of required gems & their versions, and bundler allows you to vendor those gems in a path within your app.