Installing Ruby on Rails for Windows 7 (up to date

Question

I'm a designer and not a coder and having issues with the first install.

I downloaded Rails 1.8.6 and Instant Rails.

I opened a console and tried updating gems. Nothing worked there.

I think I will just delete everything and start over because I'm sure I broke something by now. I was really thinking about buying a Mac today just to get it working.

What do you recommend for: 1. What EXACTLY to download? 2. Steps to take?

Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

To be honest I'd almost just download VirtualBox and install Ubuntu in it, then develop with Rails on there. Things just work better on *nix systems when it comes to Ruby/Rails/gems/etc. Rails development on Windows is more pain than it needs to be.

Answer 2

I've been developing with Rails on Windows 7 for over a year and have never experienced any frustrations due to this. These instructions have always worked perfectly for me.

Download and install Ruby 1.8.7

http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/71492/rubyinstaller-1.8.7-p299.exe

Download the latest RubyGems, and extract the file somewhere

http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=126

Open the command prompt, cd into the directory you extracted RubyGems too, and do "ruby setub.rb"

On the command line anywhere run "gem install rails"

I have no idea why so many people are anti Rails/Windows. I suppose OS X is easier since it comes with Rails already installed. Linux on the other hand you can easily jack up your environment if you mix up using apt-get and gems to install libraries.

Answer 3

Cody's right, but I have more to say than will fit in a comment.

Rails on Windows just pain. You don't have to buy a shiny new Mac (I do like my Mac though). I happen to prefer developing Rails apps on Ubuntu. If you do Rails development for any extended period of time you'll probably want to move to Passenger. Passenger doesn't run on Windows.

My day job is writing .net code and while Mono is great, I wouldn't develop an application targeting a Windows OS on an OS X or Linux machine. I'm not a fanboy by any means - when I decide to take on a new language or framework, I do some research and find out the best platform to use. I don't want to sit and fight with Ruby or Rails because Windows isn't well supported - I'll just go with a *nix based machine and be on my way. When in Rome...