Setup Ruby on Rails On Windows Vista

by Saurabh Bhatia

October 20, 2009

Introduction

Ruby Programming Language has been around since 1995. Created by Yukihiro "matz" Matsumoto in Japan, Ruby started gaining popularity around the world after its first English documentation, Programming Ruby, came into being. Rails was developed as a Web development framework for projects at 37signals and was released to the Public in 2004 and became an instant revolution. The subsequent years saw a huge explosion in terms of community growth, which led to a quick maturity of the Ruby Language and the Rails framework.

The task on hand today is to get a basic Ruby on Rails Development environment running on our Windows Vista machine. Once we are through with this article you will have the Ruby Language, the Rails Framework, the Application Server, a source control system to manage versioning of the code you write, Rubygems to manage Ruby based packages, MySQL Server and the client for the database.

System Requirements:

The Minimal hardware configuration required for the Development environment is 256 MB RAM, a CPU speed of minimum 1 GHz and a disk space of 50 MB.

On the Software side, make sure your Vista is up to date with the latest patches and security updates and that you are logged in as an administrator to avoid permission problems with installation of the software.

The Ruby Primer

The Ruby package for Windows is called One Click Ruby Installer and can be downloaded from Rubyforge.org, the primary source for most of the software available for Ruby. Now a days, a lot of Ruby related software can also be found out at Github. Figure 1 shows the downloaded One Click Ruby Installer. The current running version of Ruby for Windows is ruby1.8.6-27_rc2.

Figure 1

Once downloaded, run the installer. Select all the default options, as shown in figure 2 and wait for the installer to finish the work.

Figure 2

At the end of this, a folder named Ruby will be created inside your C: drive, or whichever drive you have selected during the time of installation. To make sure Ruby is installed properly on your system, open up the command prompt by typing cmd in your run box, from the start menu. Type the command:

C:\> ruby -v
  
Ruby -v  1.8.6 (2008-08-11 patchlevel 287) [i386-mswin32]

If you get this output as shown on your command line, you have installed Ruby correctly. If not, you should uninstall all the components of Ruby and try running the installer again. Ruby comes with a bunch of goodies with it's basic installation. Apart from the Ruby language interpreter it installs irb, an interactive interpreter for Ruby, Scite a text editor with coloration support for a lot of languages, a web server named Webrick , support for Rubygems, a packaging mechanism native to Ruby and a book in the form of chm, named, Programming Ruby. What more can you ask from a basic installation of a Language?

Irb can be accessed anytime by opening the command prompt and simply typing irb. Check figure 3 to see how to access irb.

Figure 3

Coming back to our subject of installing the Rails development stack, we will proceed with the installation of Rubygems. Most of the software written in Ruby is packed and distributed as .gems. Gems once installed are available system wide for use. Rubygems is a program for the system to recognize gem packages and creates gem bindings with the Ruby Interpreter.

Go to Rubygems download page on Rubyforge and download the latest zip package of Rubygems. We have used version 1.3.5 for this tutorial. After the download is over, navigate to the Download path and unzip the package with a suitable utility( WinRar or WinZip). Open the command prompt and change the directory to the path of Rubygems unzipped folder. Once inside, type the command:

C:\> ruby setup.rb

Rubygems will go through the installation and return the cursor to the command prompt. To verify our Rubygems configuration, we need to simply type:

C:\> gem -v
  
1.3.5

The display of the correct version of Rubygems is indicative of the correct configuration.

The Database

MySQL is the most popular open source database in the market these days and is quite a popular choice around the globe. In fact it was the default database for Rails until Rails 2.0.2 when SQLite became the default database.

To Install MySQL, Download the MySQL 5.4 Windows MSI package and run it.

Figure 4

Select the setup type as typical, set the port number as 3306 in the next screen and just press next for the screens to follow. The package will install and will reach a finish screen. "MySQL server configuration wizard" will start. Select detailed configuration, install as Windows service and proceed to the further screens by simply selecting next option in the installation dialog box. Setup the password for MySQL in one of the screens. This will be the root password for MySQL. Check Figure 5 to see how to set the root password.

Figure 5

Setting this would finish your MySQL setup. Lets verify the MySQL settings and check to see if it is working properly or not. You would see a MySQL command line in the menu. Clicking on that would open the command prompt and will ask you for the root password. Type in the root password and if it logs in with your credentials, your MySQL is setup.

Figure 6

In order to manage MySQL databases more efficiently we will also install GUI tools, like MySQL Administrator and MySQL Query browser. These tools are bundled up as a single .exe package and is freely downloadable from MySQL mirrors site.

Through with our database and Ruby setup, lets move on to setting up Rails and other components.

Rails and Friends:

Once the above setup is done, installing Rails is a fairly straightforward task. Simply type the command:

C:\> gem install rails

This command will install the latest stable release of Rails. However, if you want to install a specific version of Rails, you need to do:

C:\> gem install rails -V="1.2.5"

When a gem package is installed, there are 3 kinds of packages installed on the system, the gem package and it's dependencies, the ri documentation and the rdoc documentation.

Now that we have the Rails framework installed on our system, we need a database connector, in order to connect our Rails framework to the MySQL database installed.

C:\> gem install mysql

Running the above command does the trick most of the time. However we need to take care that MySQL gem gives various problems related to the installation path. In order to resolve that, we can compile it with various options manually defined.

Mongrel is a Rails application server which uses webrick as the base and is a pure Ruby implementation of an application server. We would prefer to run our Rails applications inside Mongrel. So let's install Mongrel and the mongrel_cluster.

C:\> gem install mongrel mongrel_cluster 

Figure 7

Source Control

As Rails is a highly productive framework, all the teams using Rails are bound to use Agile and Xtreme programming as a de facto standard. Keeping this in mind, a version control system is a must for all the development environments. Subversion used to be a standard choice, till 2007 but in previous years, Git has taken over Subversion in popularity, at least in the Rails world, because it supports distributed teams and distributed development. We will go through steps to setup Git locally in our systems.

Git is a Linux program natively because of its roots and is ported on Windows as an open source project hosted on Google Code called Msysgit. Download the Git-1.6.4- preview20090730, the .exe file and run the installer. As shown in figure 8, Git Bash and Git GUI, should be selected during the installation. This installs the Git commands on the system.

Figure 8

Being a Windows use, we want a gui to manage our Git repositories, we can install a front end for Git. Subversion users should find it easy to migrate to Git.

We are through with the installation, lets run a few commands on Rails to test how things are.

C:\> rails testapp

Figure 9

We will fire up the server and check to see if it's running fine or not. To do so, we change the directory to our application directory and run the command:

C:\testapp> mongrel_rails start

Figure 10

If your Windows firewall is on, it will ask for 'blocking or unblocking" the Ruby interpreter. Select Unblock and we have our server up and Running.

Rails server, mongrel or webrick, runs at Port Number 3000, so open up the browser and type: Localhost:3000 in your address bar. You will be presented with a Rails default index page.

Figure 11

Congratulations! We have successfully installed Ruby on Rails on our system. Now we are ready to develop super cool Web applications in Ruby on Rails.