does RoR develpment need shell access?

Question

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 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

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.