Ive been hosting my rails apps on freebsd Anyone have preferences which OS to host on?

Question

Is it possible to run Ruby and Rails on Mac OS X off of a local folder (without local or system install using RVM, Homebrew, etc.)

Similar to the way one can copy/paste Java installation directory and just run off of it with no dependencies, I'd like to do the same with Ruby/Rails.

The goal is to be able to connect a USB drive to someone's Mac OS X, open terminal, and demo an application (execute "rails server" from the mounted USB drive) without having to install/compile anything.

Answer 1

If you're responsible for configuration and maintenance, use what you're familiar with :-)

Otherwise, it depends on how/where you're deploying -- bare metal, VPS, Docker containers -- and personal preference. particularly on package management.

For instance, Alpine Linux is a very small image, good for containers.

The Amazon Linux AMI is RedHat-based -- if you like RPM/yum as a package manager and use AWS, perfect.

Ubuntu uses the Debian package management system, and there's a lot of documentation/examples available.

And then there's all the BSD- and Solaris-derived options. I vote for trying them all :-)