does RoR develpment need shell access?

let's say that RoR development environment is set up and working

does the developer need shell access to develop the RoR application?

would ftp开发者_高级运维 be good enough?

why? I don't want to give my future developers ssh access to my linux box. Or can I set up their file permission so they can read only their project directory?

UPDATE

the whole idea is to have below running on my VPS linux hosting

• code repository
• production environment
• test environment
• maybe development environment

for

• few projects
• that are looked after by different people

so I want the developers to be able to do their job and only be able to access their project files and maybe only I would be able do to deployment into production from test environment

As Tom mentioned, it makes life a lot easier on Rails developers if they have ssh access to the machine so they can migrate the database, run bundle install, check the logs, or just jump into console.

There are ways to segregate users though, through file/directory permissions, chroot, or but making your linux machine a bunch of virtual machines and giving them their own

You can take a look at how Heroku's client works for possible ideas, since Rails developers are able to deploy, migrate, check logs, and even get into the console without direct shell access. Deployment is all done via git hooks and then their client gives access to particular commands. This is not trivial to set up/get working, though.

Well it does not REQUIRE shell access, but it sure makes it easier.

Without it how can you migrate a db? You would have to manually create controllers, models, etc.

Short answer, you CAN develop without shell access, it is just awkward and more tedious.

This is a common situation - for instance, Network Solutions allows you to do the basic RoR install but only gives ssh access if you step up and pay extra for a VM hosting package. My suggestion is to create the app on a local machine, of course using shell commands, then FTP mirror the files up, then use mysqldump to export the local database. NSI allows you a database console whereby you can then import your database dump file. You will probably have to edit config/database.yml since the host database server is unlikely to be localhost. If the necessary gems aren't present, you will have to plead with your hosting customer service.