Ruby 1.9: Installing on Windows

Below some notes I jotted down while trying to install a complete Ruby 1.9 environment for me to work with on…. *shudder* Windows *shudder.

Why the *shudder* ? Because some ‘plugins’ for Ruby (gems) require you to build it from sourcecode (make with mingw32 C++ compiler) which leads to all kinds of errors, the first one you’ll see is:  ”You’ll have to install development tools first.”. So here’s what I did:

1. Install the Ruby 1.9 one-click installer into D:\Ruby19 from http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=167&release_id=38052, there select the rubyinstaller-1.9.1-p243-preview2.exe download.
2. Add D:\Ruby19\bin to the environment PATH variable
3. Open a command prompt and type ‘gem install scrubyt’. This leads to the above-mentioned error about no development tools found to create a make file etc. etc. etc.
4. Find this post: http://programming-gone-awry.blogspot.com/2009/05/ruby-19-one-click-installer.html and follow it’s instructions.
5. From the same RubyForge page as above, download the “devkit-3.4.5r3-20090411.7z” file too and unpack it into the D:\Ruby19 folder.
6. Change paths in D:\Ruby19\devkit\msys\1.0.11\etc\fstab to point to D:\Rub19 instead of C:\Ruby
7. Check installation of devkit with “gcc -v” in command prompt
8. Check whether installation of binary gems work by using, for example, “gem install scrubyt”

I will post more messages regarding choosing a good IDE for Ruby on Rails development and any issues I encountered while developing my Oracle10 RoR application.