Introduction
Ruby on Rails really needs no introduction if you’re in the web development space. It was born in 2003 from the frustration and anxiety behind the (usually) quite laborous web development languages and platforms at the time, with the credo of simply elegant. From the ground up it was written with a Model-View-Controller design, and powers a large batch of the web applications out there today (such as Twitter, github, basecamp and a lot of others).
This is an installation guide to getting Ruby on Rails 3.0.0 (released today) on Windows Server 2003 SR2.
Special thanks to @luislavena for his help on getting the WEBrick server to run with the new rails convention.
Download the Media
- Head over to the main ruby on rails website. Click on the giant red arrow to grab the latest 3.0.0 release.
- Find the Windows Installer link and grab the binary.
- Find the rubyinstaller-1.9.2-p0.exe link and download it.
Installing Ruby on Rails
- Launch the binary you downloaded. Hit Run at the usual Microsoft warning prompt.
- Hit Next at the welcome screen.
- Read through the license terms. Hit I accept the license when you’re ready to continue and hit Next.
- Keep the default installation folder. Check the box next to Associate .rb and .rbw files with this Ruby installation. Leave the other one unchecked for now, we’ll manually add it to the system path later. Hit the Install button.
- The installer will copy the necessary media. When the finished dialog pops up, jump for joy and hit the Finish button.
Add the Ruby path to the system PATH
I found that if you use the installer to add the Ruby binaries to your PATH, it’s only to your user’s path not to the local system path (where it’s accessible for unattended cron jobs, etc). Not a problem, we’ll fix that here.
- Right-click on My Computer.
- Hit the Properties option and then find the
Advanced tab.
- Click the Environment Variables button and locate the System Variables list in the bottom half of the screen.
- Select the Path entry and hit the Edit button. Move to the end of the Variable Value list and add c:\ruby192\bin;
- Hit Ok 3 times to close everything up
Installing Rails3.0.0
Ruby has a helpful package manager called RubyGems which assists you with installing necessary addons and their dependencies. It comes bundled with the Windows installer, so let’s continue with setting up Rails3.0.0.
- Open a command prompt
- Navigate to C:\ruby192;
- Enter gem install rails. After a few moments, you’ll see a ton of status messages from rubygems.
Install sqlite3
SQLite3 is the default database layer for ruby on rails, or at least it’s the most common. I found that I needed to install it even for a basic hello world rails application. No problem!
- Open a browser to http://www.sqlite.org/download.html
- Scroll down the page until you spot the Precompiled Binaries For Windows section. Grab the third one in the list.
- Extract the contents of the zip file to C:\windows\system32
- Open a command prompt
- Navigate to c:\ruby192
- Type bundle install
Create a “Hello World” app
To test the Ruby on Rails 3.0.0 install, we’ll create a Hello World bona fide application.
- Open a command prompt.
- Navigate to C:\ruby192.
- Type rails new c:\ruby192\helloworld
- Rails will generate the necessary starting points for your web application!
- Move into the newly created helloworld folder.
- Rails comes with its own mini-web server called WEBrick. Start it up now to host your new application. Type ruby script/rails server.
- By default WEBrick uses port 3000. Open a browser to http://localhost:3000 and take a look!
- Tada! Your first Ruby on Rails application!
Enjoy!
