Ruby on Rails on Windows the Advanced Way

Installing Ruby and Gems

Head over to the download page on rubyonrails.org and grab the newest stable version of the Windows installer (At present 1.8.6-26).

Once this downloads go a head and run the installer using all the defaults. This puts ruby in C:\ and installs ruby gems. This may take some time depending on your machine.

Once this finishes we need to update gem. To do this open up a command prompt (Start -> Run -> cmd) and type:

gem update –system

Installing Rails

Once gem is updated we can start installing the other components of the environment. We will start with Rails. In the same command prompt we just used type:

gem install rails

This takes some time and at times looks like it might have frozen up, but it hasn’t. It just takes a little bit. Go grab a drink with all this free time.

Installing A Database

Once you’re done with your drink and rails has installed its time to install a database. There are two simple options for this, SQLite3 and MySQL. SQLite is the default database that Rails uses. MySQL is the database that most people hear about in the web world because of its inclusion in the LAMP (Linux, Apachy, MySQL, PHP) architecture. I would recommend using SQLite for the first time user. Its easier to use since Rails defaults to use it as I mentioned before.

Installing SQLite

To install SQLite head over to www.sqlite.org and navigate to the download page and grab the latest SQLite Command Line Tool and SQLite DLL (At present both are at version 3.6.11). Unzip both and put the contents into the ruby\bin folder.

Now we can use install the sqlite3-ruby gem. Using the command prompt again type:

gem install sqlite3-ruby -v 1.2.3

Installing MySQL

To install MySQL head over to www.mysql.com and navigate to the download page and get the latest version of MySQL Community Server (Presently at 6.0, but we’ll use 5.1)

Run the installer.

Once this is done we will use the command prompt one last time to make sure we have the MySQL adapter. To do this, in the command prompt, type:

gem install mysql

Congratulations you are all set up and ready to start coding some Ruby on Rails!

photo credit: MissTurner

Note: This if for Rails 2.0 and on. This will not work for previous versions of Rails.

Ruby on Rails on Windows (The Easy Setup)

Head over to the Instant Rails download page on rubyforge.org and grab the newest version of Instant Rails (presently at 2.0)

Unzip this when it is done downloading. This may take a while depending on your machine.

I suggest unzipping it to C:\InstantRails. Notice that I did not put a space in between ‘Instant’ and ‘Rails’ this is because Instant Rails does not support folders with spaces in them. This means a paths such as C:\Program Files\InstantRails or C:\Instant Rails will not work.

Now that it is unzipped jump into the InstantRails folder and start up InstantRails.exe.  It will prompt you to regenerate configuration file because the path has changed. Click OK.

If you are using Windows XP SP2 or grater you will now see a firewall prompt asking if you would like to unblock apachy. Click Unblock.

Now you should see the Instant Rails control panel with everything running ok and services started. You may have to restart Instant Rails once to get MySQL started.

Lastly we have to update Ruby and Gems. To do this we have to open up a ruby console window (Click the I icon -> Rails Applications -> Open Ruby Console Window)

In this window type:

gem update –system

Again this may take a little bit. It may even look as if the system is hanging, but don’t worry it getting updating.

Once this is done type:

gem update

Congratulations you are all set up and ready to start coding some Ruby on Rails!

In Part 2 of the series we will be looking at how we can set up an advanced Ruby on Rails development environment in Windows.

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