Installing the Latest Binary Release

The solution is relatively simple though.  To start, uninstall any copy of Ruby you may have already.  This will reduce confusion as to what version is installed and where.  In this guide we’ll focus on 1.9.1 but  the instructions are the same for 1.8.7.

Go to the Ruby downloads page and select the 1.8.7 or 1.9.1 binary.

Unzip the file to C:\Ruby.  Then you’ll need to add C:\Ruby\bin to your path by following these directions:

1. Click on the Start Menu then right click on Computer and click Properties
2. Click Advanced System Settings
3. Click Environment Variables
4. Under System Variables, double click on the line with PATH in it and add ;C:\Ruby\bin to the end of it.  The semicolon is very important and must be before C:\Ruby\bin
5. Click OK and restart any command prompt windows

You’re now ready to run Ruby for Windows! You can install most gems in the usual way you would on Linux or MacOS with the gem command.

UPDATE – Missing DLL Files

There are some missing DLL’s for some necessary Ruby gems (including built-in ones), such as readline, sqlite3, and gzip.  I’ve compiled a ZIP file containing them, just put them in your C:\Ruby\bin folder, available here.  If you aren’t comfortable using it, just go to the various sites for each library that is missing and grab the DLL from there (this is what I did).

We are however working on a setup that will allow you to run Nginx+Passenger both on our cPanel and Webmin servers.  We’ll announce it here when complete (hopefully very soon), and if you’re interested in beta testing please contact us.

PassengerAppRoot /home/user/rails_apps/yourapp

Replace “user” with your username and “rails_apps/yourapp”  with the path to your Rails application. 

On the servers we have deployed the upgrade to we have added this to any existing .htaccess file or created a new one with that line in it.  However, if you use Subversion or Git repository, you’ll need to add this change to it so that the next time you do an update this change will be preserved. 

You have not made this change already, please do so as soon as you can.  This will ensure upgrades on the rest of our shared hosting cluster will go smoothly.

On the off chance that your Rails application isn’t functioning correctly, make sure the above line is in your .htaccess file in the public folder of your Rails application.

I normally do most of my Rails development in Linux, but I do have a Windows development environment setup as well, because most of my non-development time is spent in Windows and I like being able to quickly work on a Rails project without having to switch to my Linux machine.

The problem though with Rails development on Windows is two-fold:

1. Ruby and Rails do not cooperate with Windows as well as they should sometimes
2. Microsoft doesn’t cooperate with UNIX well at all

So rather than try and lay blame as to who’s fault this is, I’ve developed a workaround work flow that works quite nicely.

Software I Use

To make Rails development easier in Windows, I use:

• The E – TextEditor
• Cygwin (installed at first by e, but customized later on by me)
• puttycyg (because Windows console windows suck)

Installing the Environment

I recommend removing Ruby for Windows (the one-click installer variety) before you get started.  It will make things a lot easier for you down the road, and unless you’re doing Ruby for Windows applications development, you won’t need it.  I also recommend uninstalling Cygwin as well if you have installed it previously, because the e will automatically setup Cygwin for you with some pretty good defaults.

Download a trial of the E – TextEditor and install it.  When you first run it, it will want to install Cygwin.  Let it do so.  Pick Manual if you want to customize the software.  You can choose Automatic though and be just  fine, because you can always rerun the Cygwin setup (by going to the Cygwin website and downloading their installer) and add or update features later.  If you choose the manual method, it would be a good idea to include Subversion, Git, and perhaps other languages like Python and a C compiler to enable you to use other UNIX software inside your Cygwin installation.

Once you’ve done this, you’re almost ready to go.  If you like the Windows console, then you can stop here – but I don’t.  That’s where puttycyg comes in.   It’s basically a modified PuTTY version that works with Cygwin.  Using this program you can connect to your Cygwin instance, but having all the options of display and scrollback that come with PuTTY.  Let’s face it, being limited to 2 fonts in the Windows console really isn’t fun.  I’m still amazed Microsoft hasn’t fixed this.

Once you’ve done this, you can pretty much proceed with development of Rails application using the same commands you would on a Linux or Mac machine (well, at least with 99% compatibility).  You can even access your Windows drives with the /cygdrive/c (replace c with the drive you want to use) path in Cygwin.

Conclusion

While this isn’t the most ideal setup, it works well for most things, and enables you to use Capistrano deployments much more easily than you can in Windows.  Git’s native Windows version has a long way to go, and thus the Cygwin near-native UNIX version of Git makes using Git under Windows a far more productive task.

In this guide I’m using the E – TextEditor.  You could replace this with any other editor that you like and achieve similiar results.  You can even use Vim or Emacs inside Cygwin.  Either way, I still recommend using Cygwin, because the native Windows Ruby interpreter and Rails support for Windows will cause you problems down the road.