While Rails is easy enough to set up for a single user, there are many more choices to make when configuring Rails infrastructure for a small team. Having to cope with multiple operating systems and find productive and consistent developer tools, while catering for collaborative code development, makes requirements considerably more complex.

By choosing the proven, cross-platform, open source technologies recommended in this chapter, many of these requirements can be met at low cost and with high levels of reliability. Beyond meeting requirements, the deep integration between Rails and the suggested tools makes development more rapid and of higher quality. These are the reasons why it pays to get this right from the start.

In the next chapter, we'll start developing the Intranet application using these tools, demonstrating how they provide a smooth Rails development experience