I have a rails app that I enjoy developing on a sever much more than locally, slow computer, the problem is even though on the server the development environment is great I need a way to look at the pages I am working on live. 

This is pretty easy if I didn't care about the app being visible to the public but it cannot be visible anywhere except on the production server. 

So I had the idea of just putting a basic httpauth up and then only I can see the rails app but it is still hosted on the server.

If I were to be doing this with apache/php I would just use a .htaccess file to protect the directory but I have no clue how to protect the application from the public using WEBrick.

If anyone has any idea I really would like to have no code changes or only code changes in files I can .gitignore so deployment is still easy.