Installing Ruby

Installing ruby on rails is very easy. But don’t be mistaken, i made many errors before I finally managed to make it work.

Visit http://rubyonrails.org/download and download the latest rubyonrails windows installer. At the time of writing this article, it was 1.9.2. Download the rubygems zip files. You will find the download link on the same page.

Run the windows installer. After installing the ruby on rails, extract the rubygems and put them at an easy to find path e.g d:\ruby gems. Using the command prompt, navigate to the path where we have the setup.rb file. Then run :

D:\rubygems>Ruby setup.rb. You will see a screen like the one below.

Since ruby is now installed, we can now install all of Rails and its dependencies through the command line:

gem install rails

Congratulations, you have managed to install ruby on rails on your machine.

My dreams with Ruby on Rails

When I heard about Ruby, I thought it was one of the Mexican soap opera that was airing on a Kenyan Television channel at the time. At the time, the ‘on rails’ part didn’t make any sense.

I ignored rails for some time until I landed on ‘Redmine’ when asked to search for a project management system to be used by our company. For those who don’t know, Redmine is an open source project management system written in Ruby on Rails.

Even though I was earmarked to work on the project, I dint think about it much. I somehow managed to install with assistance of google search. The project was later handed over to someone else to manage it.

Recently, in one of the codeproject daily newsletters, there was an article that caught my attention. http://rubysource.com/why-should-a-net-developer-look-into-ruby-or-ruby-on-rails/. I searched online for information about ruby and it is on that day that I installed ruby on my machine. The rest of this blog will discuss my struggles, my finding and all the snippets that helped me succeed in my projects. 

I am planning to build a ruby on rails project from scratch. Technologies I am planning to use include MYSQL Stored Procedures, Javascript, Css,AJAX, Json and anything interesting that will come along. So, welcome aboard my journey and wish luck.