Installing Rails 2.0 for Development on Vista

I only want rails on Vista for Development, so I wanted a lean and mean environment for this. A native one, using the standard tools (and so that I could then run the native gvim with it).

Download the ruby one click installer

Install ruby, choosing the default location C:\ruby and verify that ruby is in the path.

You can verify by running a new instance of cmd and running ruby --version, if you do not get a pretty version number you may need to add it to your path:

setx path "%PATH%;C:\ruby\bin" 

Run CMD as administrator by clicking start, type in “cmd” and right click → Run as Administrator

Update gems

gem update --system

Update rails

gem install rails —include-dependencies

If you want mongrel

gem install mongrel --include-dependencies

Verify your install

• Open a cmd prompt
• Go to a good working folder (i.e. C:\Users\Name\Rails\)
• Run:
  

  rails TestProject
  cd TestProject
  ruby scripts\server
  

You should then have a shiny welcome page at http://localhost:3000/

Install Sqlite

I prefer to use sqlite for my development machine, and now that rails 2.0 defaults to it I like having it around.

Download the Precompiled sqlite Binaries For Windows

Place them in a folder in your path. I would either put them in a Bin folder in my home directory (see the next section), or drop it in C:\ruby\bin

Install the ruby gem

gem install sqlite3-ruby

Make life a little better*nix

Create a bin folder for a few of the GNU utils, I like to keep this in my home directory {{{C:\Users\Name\Bin}}}

Download UnxUtils and unzip the usr/local/bin folder to the Bin folder you created above.

Download bash.exe and bash.dll and place them in the bin folder.