Appendix A. Installing Rails

Ruby on Rails makes developing web applications easier and more productive than ever before. Not surprisingly, getting a Ruby on Rails development environment installed is pretty easy as well. But be forewarned: this is a very short appendix because getting started is pretty darn easy.

The best way to get up and running with Rails on Windows is to install everything manually. Using pre-packaged options such as Instant Rails will get you up and running quickly; however, you may not want to be stuck using the versions of MySQL, Apache, and so on, that are included in those bundles.

Windows

Ruby One-Click Installer

The Ruby One-Click Installer is the most popular Ruby Interpreter for Windows. For more details about the Ruby One-Click Installer for Windows, go to the home page at http://rubyinstaller.rubyforge.org/:

  1. Download and unzip the latest version of the Ruby One-Click Installer ZIP file from http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=167.

  2. Click through the wizard by clicking Next or I agree, depending on the page. The defaults should work perfectly.

The Ruby One-Click Installer for Windows includes the SciTE text editor with full Ruby syntax highlighting. After installing the One-Click Installer, you can find the SciTE executable at C:\ruby\scite\SciTE.exe.

We’re not done yet! The One-Click Installer doesn’t come with Rails, but getting it is easy.

Ruby on Rails

The One-Click Installer comes with the package management system for Ruby called gems. This enables ...

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