[julsonl]

Another thing to look into would be Vagrant (http://vagrantup.com/). You can have all your ruby/rails specific dependencies in a Virtualbox VM and not worry about setting it up in your host OS. It also has the added benefit of easily tearing down the instance if you manage to mess up. There's a learning curve to it, especially when setting up chef recipes, so for starters you could just bake everything into the image