SwitchTower & Co.

Phew. This was a looooong evening with SwitchTower. Today I was to setup a Debian server with Rails for a production environment. As a plus, I installed SwitchTower to make application deployment a piece of cake. But believe me, making SwitchTower + Windows XP to work is not a piece of cake.

Besides, the variety of tutorials and how-tos for building Apache/Lighttpd + Rails leads to a confusion. FastCGI or fcgid? Apache or Lighttpd? Subversion? SSH?

Rails lacks good tutorials. Most things you can find on WIKI pages aren’t working or are not working anymore. What’s more, many installation tips do not solve many problems. For example, SwitchTower installation tips do not say, that you need to install SVN binaries. And gosh… Why isn’t Windows a UNIX-like machine? Having development workstation based on Windows is some pain in the ass, especially in Rails world.

Most of the stuff is created on UNIX (OS X), so it leads to well known problems. So dear children, please, could you answer my question? Is it time to buy right tools for the development process (read: Mac)?

Last modified: 06-Feb-24