Setting up our development environment

Before we can build our app, we need to set up our local development environment so that we can commit code and deploy to Heroku.

Installing a Ruby management tool

Given the variety of ways in which Ruby can be installed, I would suggest using a Ruby / Gem management tool to handle it for you. The following are a few worth noting:

• The following tools can be used on Mac/Linux PCs:

  • Ruby Version Manager (RVM) (https://rvm.io)

  • Rbenv (https://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv)

• The following tool can be used on Windows PCs:

  • Pik (https://github.com/vertiginous/pik/)

Even if this is your only Ruby on Rails app, it's good practice to isolate applications from each other to avoid version conflicts or inadvertent software updates on. RVM allows you to not only install and manage multiple versions of Ruby on the same system, but also create gemsets which are containers for an application's gems. Gems are Ruby libraries that can be used to add common functionality to your app...