Developing in Ruby on Windows

Question

I'm starting a new job soon where I'm going to be developing in Ruby and Rails on a Windows machine. I haven't used Windows for years, and the likes of Textmate, Git and Bash, are an integral part of the workflow using a Mac.

So, does anybody have any suggestions or recommendations as to the best tools or work strategies to use? Or pitfalls to avoid?

In particular, of course, I'm interested in the best text editor. (I'm seriously thinking about taking the opportunity to learn Vim or Emacs, or whatever the Windows ports are called, but any other thoughts would be welcome.)

Additionally, any ideas of useful plugins, tools or programs would be appreciated.

If you think that I've completely lost my mind, then feel free to tell me too ;-)

cheers !

Answer 1

Cygwin as command line tool

Answer 2

NetBeans or e as IDEs

Answer 3

I am using Netbeans, which is a good overall editor (at least for me).

For simple projects I use JEdit.

You can find the link at NetBeans IDE

You can find JEdit at JEdit

Answer 4

RubyMine is supposed to be a top notch IDE. JetBrains always makes great products.

Answer 5

git is available on Windows: http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/ or http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/Git_on_Windows

Basically, you need to decide whether you are going to go the Cygwin route or the MingW route. Both will provide you with Bash as well.

GVim works great. I use the native port rather than the Cygwin version.

Answer 6

The two best RoR IDE's I've used are NetBeans and Aptana Studio. However, for the most part I stick with Notepad++ and its various plugins (Explorer and HTML tags being two important ones).

Answer 7

If your development life is switching to Windows then you may want your employer to invest in this:

Ruby In Steel by SapphireSteel Software

I've used it in the past when I started tinkering with Ruby on Rails, quite nice and reasonably mature now. Also it's built on Visual Studio which I still think is one of the premier development environments around.

Answer 8

IntelliJ IDEA

Answer 9

I developed in RoR under Windows for a few years, it's bearable, but Linux (or Mac) is much better for this. Lots of gems and plugins are considerably harder to install on Windows (quixml, for example).

My favorite text editor under Windows is Textpad, Eclipse is also pretty good.

If you want to use ls, find, grep... in Windows console, just download some package of their Win32 ports, install them and add to your PATH (Cygwin is definitely better, but also harder to install). You might also try out Powershell, it's supposed to be a replacement for unix command line by Microsoft.

Answer 10

This may not be applicable in your situation (IT restrictions, etc), but another option might be virtualization. You could install VirtualBox, VMWare, or some equivalent, and run Ubuntu (or your preferred Linux distribution, of course) that way, gaining access to the full UNIX toolset.

Answer 11

Here's my incredibly detailed setup guide for Windows Server 2003, which works essentially unchanged on XP Pro and Vista. See this general installation list, and modify the instructions if you get different results. They're meant for people new to programming, so they'll probably be overly explicit for your purposes.

IMO, the one thing you definitely need is a *nix-style shell. This has nothing to do with whether you like dir or ls - you need to be able to run shell scripts or you won't get very far.

git bash (comes with msysgit) is my beacon in the storm of cmd.exe windows. It's essentially bash on Windows, and lets you run almost any script that you can run on *nix. This includes all the gem command line executables.

It gets weird in a few places.

• File permissions - there just isn't a great way to map between Windows ACLs and POSIX file permissions. The Cygwin people have devoted years to solving it, but it still doesn't work all the time. git bash's approach is to just not do anything when asked to do a (for example) FileUtils.chmod. That means you may need to create a few more directories by hand, and you do need to be very aware of when something is changing file permissions.

For example, when I installed the Heroku gem on Windows, it tried to set the permissions of my Heroku credentials file, which has my Heroku password in plaintext, to u+r go-rwx. You'd definitely want to change the ACLs on that file if you're on a shared machine.

• Scripts vs. .bat files - I wanted to change git's default editor from vi to SCiTE (not that I don't like vi; this was for a new-user workshop and I didn't want to explain editing modes). I had to create a .bat file that was actually a shell script. See the full explanation here:

How can I set up an editor to work with Git on Windows

Answer 12

Maybe bring a LiveCD to work with you every morning..

you can even put it on a usb flash drive, if you use a small enough distro/big enough drive...

Answer 13

You didn't say whether you're using Windows voluntarily. However, this line suggests to me that maybe that's the case:

"If you think that I've completely lost my mind, then feel free to tell me too"

If you have any choice in the matter, I strongly recommend using a Unix-based system instead of Windows. If you have to go through inconvenience, spend money, or jump through hoops to avoid doing Ruby/Rails development on Windows, it will be worth it.

I've had to cope with Ruby and Rails on Windows a lot recently due to legacy systems and other developers' preferences. Rails development on a Unix-based system is much more efficient. The difference is not subtle.

That said, as others have mentioned, installing mysysgit even if you aren't using Git is helpful because it comes with Git Bash which gives you a usable bash command line.

As for text editors, I like Notepad++.

NetBeans is a really nice IDE for Rails development. Decent syntax highlighting, code completion, error highlighting. Handy keyboard shortcuts for navigation. It's pretty good.

Answer 14

I use virtual box, putty, and xming to do the development in an isolated linux environment. I blogged the full setup here