Using Ruby in a development team poses several common problems:

1. Developers use OSX, administrators use Linux or BSD.
2. Different machines have different software versions
3. People make undocumented changes to development or production servers

All of these things reduce the ability to launch a fresh deployment of the software for development, staging, or production.

Ruby in a Box is a very simple build system to solve these problems:

1. Depend only on very fundamental packages (gcc, Bash, etc.) which can be relied upon (no chicken/egg problems).
2. Build everything else from the source checkout: Ruby, gems, etc.
3. Everything runs from inside the checkout. To un-install, just delete all the files.

Ruby in a Box is meant to be a Git submodule of other projects. Developers can hook into the build process to add their own gems, configuration files, etc.

To use it, source the env.sh file. Whatever isn't built yet will be, and whatever is already built will be used.

$ . ruby-inabox/env.sh
# ... Dependencies built

$ which ruby
.../ruby-inabox/build/bin/ruby

$ which gem
.../ruby-inabox/build/bin/gem

$ gem list

*** LOCAL GEMS ***

rake (0.8.7)

Everything you need is included in OSX 10.5 ("Snow Leopard").

Ruby in a Box depends on a few fundamental software packages which either ship with the operating system or can be installed trivially.

On Ubuntu, and Debian, run the following command:

apt-get -y install make gcc zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libreadline5-dev bison

Uninstalling is very simple:

rm -rf ruby-inabox/build

To rebuild from scratch, just remove everything and re-source the env.sh file.