Advice for Setting Up Rails Sites for Prototyping

Question

I'm learning Ruby on Rails and have just signed up with LunarPages as my webhosting company. To start, I want to write some test applications and get them uploaded and running on my website just to understand how things work. However, I don't want anyone looking at what I'm working on as I learn. Does anyone have any advice as to how I should structure my pages and sites in such a way that I can keep them hidden until I'm ready to go live? Can I easily do something like this?

www.mysite.com <- everyone can see www.mysite.com/testapplication1 <- no one can see for now www.mysite.com/testapplication2 <- no one can see for now

Sorry if this sounds like a stupid question. I'm just starting out. By the way, I have heard of Heroku but I've already paid for this webhosting service so I'd like to get my money's worth, at least until my subscription is up.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I'm not sure if LunarPages offers the level of configurability that is required to run rails apps from sub-directories. I'd use subdomains (testapp1.mysite.com, testapp2.mysite.com) and then use appropriate access control (could be htaccess, HTTP BASIC AUTH in your app, or something more complex like authlogic)