Sandbox

DESCRIPTION:

Inspired by Python’s virtualenv project, Sandbox is a utility to create sandboxed Ruby/Rubygems environments.

It is meant to address the following issues:

  • Conflicts with unspecified gem dependency versions.

  • Applications can have their own gem repositories.

  • Permissions for installing your own gems.

  • Ability to try gems out without installing into your global repository.

  • A Simple way to enable this.

Running from your own gem repositories is fairly straight-forward, but managing the necessary environment is a pain. This utility will create a new environment which may be activated by the script ‘bin/activate` in your sandbox directory.

Run the script with the following to enable your new environment:

$ source bin/activate_sandbox

When you want to leave the environment:

$ deactivate_sandbox

NOTES:

  • It creates an environment that has its own installation directory for Gems.

  • It doesn’t share gems with other sandbox environments.

  • It (optionally) doesn’t use the globally installed gems either.

  • It will use a local to the sandbox .gemrc file

FEATURES/PROBLEMS:

Activating your sandbox environment will change your HOME directory temporarily to the sandbox directory. Other environment variables are set to enable this funtionality, so if you may experience odd behavior. Everything should be reset when you deactivate the sandbox.

USAGE:

Create a new sandbox (verbose output by default):

$ cd ~/ruby-projects
$ sandbox my-new-sandbox
creating new sandbox in /home/nkryptic/ruby-projects/my-new-sandbox
installing activation script
installing .gemrc
installing gems:
  nothing to do

Create a new sandbox with no output:

$ cd ~/ruby-projects
$ sandbox my-new-sandbox -q

Create a new sandbox with specific gems:

$ cd ~/ruby-projects
$ sandbox my-new-sandbox -g rake,rails
creating new sandbox in /home/nkryptic/ruby-projects/my-new-sandbox
installing activation script
installing .gemrc
installing gems:
  gem: rake
  gem: rails

FUTURE PLANS:

I hope to expand the full version branch to allow for installing both rubygems and ruby as part of the sandbox. This would enable experimentation with different versions of both and exclude the requirement on needing rubygems in the first place.

REQUIREMENTS:

  • ruby

  • rubygems

INSTALL:

sudo gem install nkryptic-sandbox -s http://gems.github.com

or

sudo gem sources --add http://gems.github.com
sudo gem install nkryptic-sandbox

LICENSE:

(The MIT License)

Copyright © 2008 Jacob Radford

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the ‘Software’), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.