What about gems, plugins, and different Rails versions?

We are definitely going to support gems and plugins. We are almost finished with a slick gem and plugin installer you can use for each app. In the meantime, you can install plugins by importing or uploading the files directly into vendor/plugins.

Currently, we only support the latest stable version of Rails. You can use a different version by uploading a frozen vendor/rails, but this may not work because of the 10MB storage limit constraint (rake rails:freeze:edge won’t work, by the way, because there are no outgoing network connections yet – we’ll discuss this in more detail in another post). We hope to be expanding our features in this area shortly.

Are my application and data secure?
I can execute arbitrary shell commands!

This is a brand new, limited beta, so we are not making any promises about security. That being said, we have worked hard to provide a secure environment, and we believe your application and data are completely secure.

Because we are providing a platform for executing ruby code, you have full access to system commands. While you don’t have an actual shell, you do have the ability to run shell commands via ruby. This is a feature, not a bug. We don’t believe you should need to run shell commands for any purpose, but giving our users a full ruby environment is important to us. Being able to run arbitrary shell commands is not a security threat the way the system is architected.

Can I have multiple environments, staging and production?
Can I run an app with the environment set to production?

Yes, we plan to offer multiple instances of your app and allow you to set the environment type for each. For now, however, each application has only one instance, and is always in development mode.

What about testing?

Testing is very very important to us and we plan to fully support it (we haven’t yet decided if this will be the standard Test::Unit or RSpec – email us if you have thoughts on the topic). We have several great tools and features planned for testing. For now, however, a testing database is not provided, so tests can’t be run. This is coming soon.

Hosting, performance, paid accounts?

We plan to offer multiple paid account types, with varying levels of features and performance. We will also always offer a free account. For right now, we are only offering one-size-fits-all free accounts.