So I wanted to get up and running with a development system for Ruby on Rails, on my shiny freshly installed Windows 7 machine (so, no development stuff on it as of yet whatsoever). However, the recent Ruby update to 1.9.1 brought such big changes that apparently, many libraries don’t work with it anymore – so the installer of choice, the One-Click Ruby Installer, is (for now) stuck at supporting Ruby 1.8.6 only.
Update 2009-06-23 15:12: There seems to be a way to make the one-click installer build Ruby 1.9.1, guess I’ll have to try that out.
The One-Click Ruby Installer is not dead, and there’s even a design vote for the 1.9.1 website. But since I want my development environment bleeding edge and I want it now, I’ll just have to make do with a manual install. Since I haven’t found a tutorial detailing the steps for that, I’ll just do it from scratch and take you along the ride. Good tutorials I did find are:
- The Best Environment for Rails on Windows, including a rant against IDEs
- Installing Rails on Windows, including a guide for setting up MySQL
- Time For A Grown-Up Server, for adding Mongrel and Apache
So, what do we need, for a full-blown environment?
- Ruby 1.9.1 – obviously, can’t have Ruby without Ruby
- Ruby Gems 1.3.4 – since gems are the Ruby way of distributing anything
- Rails 2.3 – obviously, can’t have Ruby on Rails without Rails
- MySQL 5.1 – the database we’ll use, although others would work as well
- Mongrel 1.1.5 – reliable and secure webserver
That’s it for the start, but for additional tool goodness (and in order to have some of the above run properly in the first place) we need more:
- Git 1.6.3.3 – the version control used by rubyists
- Subversion 1.6.3 – very widespread version control (and I refuse to add CVS to this list)
- MinGW and MSYS – to make sure gems can be installed and compiled if necessary
- Rake 0.8.3 – the ruby version of make
- Ruby-Debug 0.10.3 – who doesn’t like debuggers
- ImageMagick 6.5.3 – can be used by Rails
- Firebug 1.4.0b2 – for debugging web apps’ JavaScript code (requires the Firefox 3.5 beta)
- Web Developer 1.1.6 – for CSS and HTML stuff
- MySQL Control Center 0.9.4 – or an alternative that can admin MySQL databases
- Apache 2.2.11 – front-end webserver for load balancing and whatnot
An intimidating list at first sight, but I did try to get everything I might need in there. The hard part then will be making all of them talk together. Concerning the actual development environment, I am as of yet undecided between gVim and an IDE like Aptana or RubyMine. Both have upsides and downsides.
So, is this list complete, do you see anything I’ve missed? Or do I have anything on it that you think is irrelevant? Let me know in the comments!
So much for talking the talk – the next step will be walking the walk, and I’ll make sure to give you a full tutorial afterwards.
Update 2009-06-24 16:05: Yep, Ruby on Rails is installed. Here is how I did it.
June 25th, 2009 @ 0:58
Greatings, Ugh, I liked! So clear and positively.
Pett
July 30th, 2009 @ 12:20
the interface of Windows 7 is great but in my opinion Windows XP is still a very solid and stable operating system. Right now, I would never give up XP for Windows 7.
July 31st, 2009 @ 8:17
You guys make it really hard to decide whether you’re spamming or commenting in the more traditional sense…
And you are the reason why I removed my DoFollow plugin. So links are nofollow in this blog just like any other now. Maybe that’ll stop the tide.
Maybe I should have a commenting policy of “every comment that uses anything but a real name as ‘name’ will be deleted”?
August 10th, 2009 @ 2:07
Would you be interested in writing for The Neave Online Publication? I love your writing style and I feel like you would fit in perfectly with the other writers.
August 10th, 2009 @ 13:59
Thanks a lot for asking, but I don’t think I have the time for that
Good luck with your publication anyway! Looks neat, judging by what I saw in my short glance at it.
August 25th, 2009 @ 3:33
Windows 7 is much better than Windows Vista when it comes to performance. i like Windows 7 just like Windows XP
August 26th, 2009 @ 10:01
Aye, same here, I skipped Windows Vista on my gaming PC.
I took the liberty to remove the link that would have made your comment spam (and would consequently have made me delete it), I hope you are happy with that just like me as well.
September 5th, 2009 @ 18:46
Man I had the same problem with the quasi-spam and came to the same conclusion as you – remove the links. Sometimes they trick you because they just take a quote from your article and you think “hey that’s a good point” – yeah because you wrote it initially! Hah hah.
I reckon comments that show intelligence and actually say something about your article can have a link, anything else gets deleted or links removed. There’s something satisfying about just removing the links but leaving the comments… hard to put my finger on it but I guess you know the feeling.
May 7th, 2010 @ 7:33
I’m pretty much impressed with the stability of Windows 7. It is better than windows Vista which hogs my memory and cpu.:*;
May 10th, 2010 @ 9:51
Yeah, I feel the same. I had Vista at work for quite a bit, which pressed me to skip it at home – and after trying the Windows 7 release candidate at home, I convinced my boss that having Windows 7 at work is a good thing as well :p
Sorry about removing your link, and the link you posted in that other comment as Jessica Bailey. While the comments clearly are not technically spam, I see links with comments as a way to promote a personal site of the commenter, and not some third-party site with a purely commercial interest and not much connection to the poster.