why am I getting 'could not find gem rails locally...' when trying to upgrade InstantRails2.0 to rails 2.3?

Question

The full error message is "could not find rails gem locally or in a repository". I've read the Rails Wiki about upgrading rails and it doesn't have any info on this error. I'm running on WinXp. The Rails Wiki said I needed to first do update_rubygems, and it appears I was able to do that successfully. My ruby version is 1.8.6. I googled this particular error and got a few hits about making sure the gem sources included gems.rubyonrails.org, which mine does.

Any suggestions? What other environment info do I need to provide?

Is there a way to download and install the latest version of rails if I continue to have issues?

Answer 1

I'm not very familiar with instant rails, but it looks like it hasn't been updated since rails 2.0.

Here's a link to someone who had a similar issue and resolved it in the end by install rails from github.

If that doesn't work, it's been a while since I've developed Rails on windows, but if you update your version of ruby gems (also described in the link), then the following should work for both installing and update rails:

gem install rails

If that doesn't work I'd uninstall Instant Rails and install based on the windows install instructions on the rails wiki. This will get you setup for developing on the windows box using sqlite and the built in server that comes with Rails (WEBrick or mongrel if you install the gem). You don't need or even want to use heavyweight dbs and servers for development - just a hassle.

If you intend to use Windows as a server platform too, then things get a bit trickier. I did this for a while a few years ago, but it was such a pain it was part of why I learned Linux, and it was well worth it. When I did this on Windows I used XAMPP to install mySQL and Apache.