Rails: Simplifying Local Environment Setup

Rails includes a default script, bin/setup, that runs some basic environment setup such as installing gems, creating and seeding the database, and so on.

Often, though, any further environment setup, such as configuring default user accounts, installing supporting services, and so on, is described in a project's README. With time, this document grows and the installation process becomes more complicated, often including lots of copy-and-paste scripts, manual file edits, and so on.

I'm working on upgrading a legacy application that had used this approach, and so spent some time consolidating the various setup requirements and configurations into an automated bin/setup script.

The result was that the full local development stack, including supporting Docker images, became a simple one-line command:

$ bin/setup

The benefits of such a small investment can be huge, especially when onboarding new members to your dev team, or simply spinning up a new working copy of the application for yourself.

Keeping the setup in a single command also makes it simpler to provision working environments in services such as Github Codespaces.