Vagrant (and docker?) development environment

[tntim96]

To assist with contributions, it would be good to have more instructions or a sub-project to set-up a development environment in vagrant (I'm happy to help). Having just tried setting up a VM myself (on Ubuntu, lucid32), I found a number of snags (again with Ruby installation).

For example, I started with Ruby 1.9.1, but found octokit required at least 1.9.2. I found that 1.9.2 doesn't seem to be available for Ubuntu (http://leonard.io/blog/2011/12/installing-ruby-1-9-2-on-ubuntu-11-10-oneric-ocelot-without-using-rvm/) and applied this hack, http://www.javaworld.com/article/2074556/core-java/installing-ruby-1-9-2-on-ubuntu-12-04-lts--precise-pangolin-.html. After all that Rake still failed. This also excludes other steps like:
sudo apt-get -y update
sudo apt-get -y install build-essential zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libreadline6-dev libyaml-dev
sudo apt-get -y install git-core

Node installation was easy from git, but you can't use 'sudo apt-get install node'.

Rather than continue on this path, I'd prefer look at using (and assisting in creating) a reliable and repeatable VM. A VM would avoid version clashes on developer machines and allow Windows users to contribute. Do you see any issues with creating such a VM (e.g. browser testing via the VM)?

To get started, what version of Ruby and NodeJS do you (or your CI) use, and can you recommend a particular Linux distribution (e.g. has Debian got smoother Ruby support)?

[tntim96]

Not automated, but this works https://github.com/tntim96/jasmine-vagrant