Limitations in running Ruby/Rails on windows

Question

In the installation documentation to RoR it mentions that there are many limitations to running Ruby on Rails on Windows, and in some cases, whole libraries do not work.

How bad are these limitations, should I always default to Linux to code / run RoR, and is Iron Ruby expected to fix these limitations or are they core to the OS itself?

EDIT Thanks for the answer around installation and running on Linux, but I am really trying to understand the limitations in functionality as referenced in the installation documentation, and non-working libraries - I am trying to find a link to the comment, but it was referenced in an installation read me when I installed the msi package I think

EDIT Thanks for the references to IronRuby lately, it is certainly a project to watch, and as it, obviously, is a .NET language, it will be invaluable if it lives up to the promises. Eventually, however, in my case, I just bit the bullet and installed an Ubuntu server.

<bias> I should've done it years ago </bias>

Answer 1

In general, Rails performance is a problem on Windows.

As far as your deployment setup, you can either run Rails in FCGI or use mongrel (and set up either Apache or IIS as a proxy). mod_rails (http://www.modrails.com) is the best deployment option for Rails today, but doesn't run on Windows.

You might find more luck using JRuby on Windows to run Rails in whatever JVM environment you want (tomcat, J2EE server, etc).

IronRuby isn't there yet to run Rails in a production environment, but eventually it will be aimed at running Rails inside any ASP.NET environment (IIS).

Answer 2

Nobody mentioned Bitnami RubyStack yet? I've been using it for years, together with RadRails. Includes Apache, MySQL/Postgre, phpmyadmin, git etc. Optional Ruby 1.9.2/Rails 3.0b. You may also run the Ubuntu flavor of RubyStack in a VM but I haven't tried that yet.

Answer 3

I've been developing Rails on a Windows PC for a couple of years and had no real problems installing back when I first started. However I recently re-built my machine and struggled to get the One-Click Ruby installer working and the latest version of Gems. So this is what I tried.

Option 1: Run a Linux Virtual Machine

I was really impressed with Charles Roper's idea of running Rails within a Linux virtual machine, and this is the route I intially went for. It all went pretty smoothly and I've been documenting it at budanters.blogspot.com. However I've been struggling with accessing the MySQL server (in Linux Virtual Machine) from the Windows host.

Option 2: Use jRuby

I recently installed the Windows version of NetBeans 6.5 Ruby bundle, and without being aware of it, this installs JRuby and the Rails gems. The IDE has a UI to install Gems, and I've now got my old application back up and running in my development enviromnent.

Update November 2009

I now use Netbeans 6.7 on Windows and in the whole I am very happy with it. The only downsides are that it installs JRuby 1.2, and I needed to install JRuby 1.3 manually to get something working (I can't remember what) and I have been completely unable to get deployment working with either Capistrano or Vlad the Deployer to work. Vlad uses Open4 which doesn't work with JRuby.

Update May 2010

Netbeans 6.8 comes with JRuby 1.4 so no longer have to fiddle around with manually installing JRuby 1.3. Also it seems that in JRuby 1.5 Open4 will now work, which means Vlad might start working.

Answer 4

The biggest limitation of running under Windows is that a lot of things are super slow.

See this thread. For a discussion.

Simple things like "script/console" and running rake tasks will take 5 times longer on Windows than they do on Linux or Mac.

Other limitations are:

• No IE6 on Vista.
• BackgroundRB and a many other c based gems do not work on Windows.
• No passenger