Recently I was faced with the challenge of presenting a rails application that I’ve developed at home and in my spare time to my co-workers at my place of work. The problem was that my place of work does not use ruby on rails and are quite strict on letting you install new software. I’m sure this is quite a common scenario

After doing some research online I found a tutorial which showed me how to create a portable version of Ruby on Rails which I could save on a USB flash drive and carry around with me wherever I go. This saved me from having to install anything on my work pc, and allowed me to successfully demo my application.

• Portable Ruby on Rails Tutorail

Word of caution, this will only run on windows.

After the break: how I implemented Portable Apps and added MySQL support.

I followed the instruction for the Portable Ruby on Rails Tutorail, except I did not want to use SQLite3. Normally I use MySQL as my development database and luckily it too can be added to your portable arsenal fairly easily. From the Portable Apps website you can download and find instructions to install XAMPP which is a bundled package of Apache, MySQL, PHP, and phpMyAdmin. Thats right, you can bring all those goodies along with you as well!

Now all I have to do to get some rails time in on the go is plug in my thumb drive. I started out with a 2GB stick which was barely enough to hold everything and recently upgraded to an 8GB which these days you can find pretty cheap when they are on sale.

You will find performance is slower than on your normal computer, but the ability to use these applications on almost any computer in my opinion offsets any speed issues.

If you try this tutorial out let me know how it worked for you!