Curt Hibbs, the creator of Instant Rails, says he created the package basically because he is lazy, and he wants to make as easy as possible to get up and running with Rails for himself and anyone else as possible. I’ve used Instant Rails myself once, as a kind of staging environment on a Windows 2003 server, and I was curious to find out more about this out-of-the-box solution for Rails.

The most interesting stuff that came out of Hibbs’ relatively short presentation, was the plans for a version 2 of Instant Rails. Hibbs criticized several areas of Instant Rails 1.x, in particular that it is only available for Windows, that it uses old versions of Apache and MySQL and that the user interface sucks! Version 2 will be a complete rewrite featuring:

  • Cross-platform support (Windows, OSX, Linux)
  • Webbased manager application written in Rails with a vastly improved UI
  • Ability to manage the sites remotely
  • Apache 2 and MySQL 5
  • Integrated support for RadRails

The last thing is interesting since I am using RadRails for my Rails development. The RadRails guys was right in the front row of the Instant Rails presentation, so guess they have ganged up with Hibbs here at RailsConf. The integration means, that if you install RadRails inside the Instal Rails directory (which can be anywhere), Instant Rails will, when started, detect RadRails and automatically setup the path to Ruby and Rails, and also create projects for the sites hosted by that Instant Rails instance. I don’t know if I can use that for anything, but it could be handy for getting people up and running fast.