Installing Ruby on Rails in windows 7

Question

hi!

I saw some ruby tutorials today and like to learn it. The problem is that i'm stuck with the installation process! :(

I can't get a clear picture on how to install RoR. For example, to write php code i installed wamp and straight away started writing php scripts. And i'm using Dreamweaver CS4 as an IDE.

Can anyone enlighten me :

1) the process of installing RoR?

2) an IDE for RoR

3) What are gems? are they modules?

thanks :)

Answer 1

The best way to start is using the one-click installer. I advise using the older installer ( http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/47082/ruby186-27_rc2.exe ) instead of the new RubyInstaller, because the latter is still a bit immature. While installing select rubygems support and the add ruby to the PATH option, to ease access to ruby binaries.

After installing (takes a while), fire a console, and install rails (and a database connector, like sqlite3) using the commands

gem install rails
gem install sqlite3-ruby –version=1.2.3

(the 1.2.3 version of the sqlite3 gem will work on windows correctly)

As you have guessed correctly gems are modules to ruby, and ruby on rails is one of these modules.

Now you have installed both ruby and rails, fire up a console, and type

rails applicationname

to create your first rails application. From here on read the tutorials and documentations.

Rails doesn't really need an IDE for development, you can use any decent text editor, but there are rails plugins for IDEs like eclipse, and editors like vim or emacs.

Answer 2

Answering on the IDE part: Besides a good plain text editor (vim and emacs have been suggested already), I found the netbeans IDE to work really well, especially on Windows.