SuckLessAtRails

This is Part 1 in a series of tutorials teaching you how to set up a Rails 2.0 development environment on your machine be it a mac, Linux box or Windows machine. Today we will be covering the easy way to set up Rails 2.0 on Windows machines.

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.

photo credit: ChrisGoldNY