Welcome to the Treehouse Community
Want to collaborate on code errors? Have bugs you need feedback on? Looking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project? Get support with fellow developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels here with the Treehouse Community! While you're at it, check out some resources Treehouse students have shared here.
Looking to learn something new?
Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today.
Start your free trialKaiyang Lin
5,573 PointsWhat is the Treehouse virtual machine for?
I'm currently on the "Installing a Ruby Development Environment" course, and after the first segment on how to install ruby and rails on a windows PC, the course's next segment is instructions about how to install the Treehouse VM.
What I'm confused about is why there is a need to install the VM - or really, what the purpose of the VM is. It seems as though we use the VM to test our rails app, but weren't we already able to do that without installing the VM (we were able to access our rails app at localhost after installing ruby, rails and the other relevant gems)?
Thank you for clarifying!
1 Answer
Jason Anello
Courses Plus Student 94,610 PointsHi Kaiyang,
It might not have been made clear in the videos but the vm is optional. You would either install all the software on your windows pc or you would use the virtual machine which contains all the software already setup.
It sounds like you already have the software set up on windows so you could just go with that and not worry about the vm. I would still watch the videos though so you at least know what it's about.
Also, the videos have a note in the Teacher's Notes section below the video that mentions there are newer versions of these videos available as workshops.
check below this video for the links:
I would recommend watching those as well to see if you need to make any updates or changes to what you've already done.
Kaiyang Lin
5,573 PointsKaiyang Lin
5,573 PointsHi Jason,
Thanks for clarifying! I actually saw the later version of the videos as workshops after posting this question, and I've checked them out! I will follow the setup in that video.
Thank you again for explaining about the VM, was getting pretty lost amongst the more technical software that was needed!