Nitrous.IO enables you to develop web applications completely in the cloud. This development "box" helps you write software, collaborate real-time with friends, show off apps to teammates or clients, and deploy apps to production hosting sites like Heroku or Google App Engine.

This box is a fully functional Linux environment in which you can develop any Linux-based application. This box comes bundled with gcc, make, perl and other system-level libraries, enough to get you started on your application development journey.

We recommend that you use Github (www.github.com) to manage your application's code. To interact with your code on Github, you'll need to add your Nitrous.IO box's SSH keys to Github. Follow these steps to get started:

http://help.nitrous.io/github-add-key/

Your box comes installed with Autoparts, with which you can install databases such as MySQL, Redis, Postgres, Memcache and many others. Look for the "Autoparts" menu in the IDE, or read more here:

http://help.nitrous.io/autoparts/

Once you're running a webserver, keep an eye on the port where your server is running. Then click the "Preview" menu title in the IDE above and select the port where your application is running. For more information, check out this help article:

http://help.nitrous.io/preview/

You can invite friends and teammates into this web IDE session so you can code collaboratively on the same codebase. This can be really helpful when giving tutorials, troubleshooting some code, or just doing some pair programming. Click the "Collaborate" menu and then manage collaborators.

http://help.nitrous.io/collab/

Once you've built your application, you can deploy to various cloud services such as Heroku, Google App Engine, Nodejitsu, Azure and others. You can read more about it here:

http://help.nitrous.io/categories/deployment/

Ruby is installed via Autoparts and can be managed with chruby. You can install additional Ruby versions using Autoparts.

For example, to install Ruby 2.0:

parts install ruby2.0

To use a specific Ruby version, create a .ruby-version file:

echo 'ruby-2.1' > .ruby-version

This Ruby box also comes with Node.JS installed via Autoparts.