RoR: What steps are you going through in the preparation phase of application development?

Question

Let's say you already "know" what your client wants from you (i.e. you already did some analysis and have some clue about what are you supposed to deliver). What are the next steps you usually go through after this phase? In other words, what are the steps (in terms of preparation of the framework, plugins, repository, etc.) you do in the beginning of every RoR based application development?

Answer 1

The first thing that we usually do here at work is to get a hosted virtual private server (VPS) as a development server (slicehost? whatever that fits your pocket) where you can ssh into and configure the following

1. Setup up server combination of your choice (apache, lighttpd, nginx, thin, etc.)
2. Setup ruby, rails, gems and plugins that you think you're gonna use
3. Setup your database of choice
4. Setup versioning software of your choice (git, mercurial, subversion, etc)
5. Create a repository for your project and check out into your local machine
6. Start coding, check in often and deploy often too for client testing

I think it's really worth getting VPS to deploy a test version of your application that your colleagues and client can do some user testing and issue a bug tracking ticket whenever they encounter some bugs that developers have overlooked. This will keep your client happy too when they constantly see incremental progress to their apps.