Installing RubyOnRails 1.1
I was looking for a turtorial on how to install RubyOnRails on my computer at work today. Doing so at my home computer was easy, because I use a Mac at home and Hivelogic has put together a fantastic step-by-step for that install.
Windows on the other hand is in the land of one-click installs. I was using version 1.82 of Ruby and needed to upgrade to 1.84 in order to run the latest version of Rails(1.1). Fortunately a one-click installer for Ruby 1.84 has been released, so I gave it a try.
Here I ran into my first snag. Something that was running in my previous install of Ruby could not be over-written. A file named libeay.dll in my ruby\bin directory. So I decided to do an uninstall of Ruby before trying to complete the new install. Everything but the above mentioned BIN directory was uninstalled which the uninstaller recommended deleting directly. So I navigated to it and hit DELETE but was stopped by the same file (libeay.dll). I couldn’t find it running in the processes of the machine, so instead of digging deeper I rebooted and tried the delete again. This time it worked. Now the “One-Click Ruby Installer” successfully installs the newest version of Ruby and Ruby Gems.
With Ruby and Gems installed, I now should be able to use the simple:
gem install rails --include-dependenciesUnfortnately I’m behind an organization firewall and contacting the external site to download the latest dependencies is one of the many things that I’m blocked from doing. So it appears I have to do this manually.
For Rails to run properely, with all its intended functionality, seven Gems need to be downloaded and installed in order. Download the latest Gems from the links below and run them in the order they are listed.
Activesupport
Actionpack
Actionmailer
Activerecord
Actionwebservice
Rake
Rails
Download the ”.gem” file into a common location for each. Then open your command line (Start > Run > cmd) and navigate to the directory with these files. I downloaded mine to C:\src. Once in the directory run each of these in the order they are listed above, using:
gem install <gem_name>Substituting <gem_name> for activesupport, actionpack, actionmailer, etc.
Once complete, test out your install by trying to create a Rails application. Hopefully all is working fine.
Now you’re set to build cool apps. Go change the web.
Note: You can use Instant Rails to take care of all this for you, but I just wanted to have a simple install of Ruby and Rails on my system, without Apache and MySql. It just my preference.
