I’ve been doing a fair amount of work with the excellent Ruby on Rails web development framework lately, and have come across a number of useful tools and resources that I wanted to share with other Rails developers. All of the following are free, but note that Locomotive and CocoaMySQL are Mac-only.

Locomotive

Locomotive is a tool for installing Ruby, Rails, and the various libraries you need to get started developing on Rails. After installation, the interface functions as a server manager to run your Rails apps locally on the ports you set. When I started with Rails, I didn’t know about Locomotive: after manually downloading and installing Ruby, Rails, and the LightTPD server and spending a long while on the command line compiling and recompiling, I finally got my local environment configured properly. Then I came across Locomotive, and haven’t gone back to managing things manually since. It’s slick, lightweight, and does what it promises! What more can you ask for in a piece of software?

CocoaMySQL

CocoaMySQL is useful for anyone managing MySQL databases, whether for Rails development or otherwise. I got sick of phpmyadmin‘s bugs, outdated interface, and the need to use a browser to view and edit my databases. For Mac users, CocoaMySQL is a lightweight, well-designed MySQL management app that fits nicely into the OS X ecosystem. It’s become my always-open DB utility when I’m developing.

Railscasts.com

Railscasts are the product of the hard work and Rails expertise of Ryan Bates. After reading several extremely useful tutorials posted by Ryan at the Rails Forum, I followed the link to Railscasts in his signature. I’m glad I did. Three times a week, Ryan posts well thought-out, easy-to-follow screencasts showing various Rails techniques. The videos are short (under 10 minutes), well-produced, and very helpful. His presentation style is clear, gentle, and he thorougly explains what he’s doing on-screen. I’ve already put the lessons I’ve learned in the Logger and Pretty Page Titles episodes into practice, and I’m eager to learn more. And, unlike PeepCode, all the videos at Railscasts are free!