For kicks I wanted to Ruby on Rails working. Here’s the combination of stuff I was using:

  • Windows laptop running Vista.
  • Mongrel web server which I think comes with default install of rails
  • sqlite database. I didn’t want to put mysql or something else on this machine quite yet.

Here are the steps I followed.

  1. Went to http://www.rubyonrails.org. Clicked on the Download tab and followed the steps to download stuff.
  2. First item was ruby, which I installed to C:\ruby. Ruby comes with an installer. It was ruby186-26.exe for the version I downloaded.
  3. Then it was on to gems. You download the file, extract it, then run ruby setup.rb.
  4. I installed rails. That just involves typing in gem install rails –include-dependencies.
  5. Step 4 above might have been enough to install mongrel, a web server that rails can use. However, I ran gem install mongrel just to be sure.
  6. To get sqlite working, I downloaded sqlite from www.sqlite.org. I put sqlite3.exe, sqlite3.dll and sqlite3.def in c:\sqlite. HOWEVER, to get things working with ruby and rails, I copied these three files to c:\ruby\bin. THIS was critical.
  7. Then install the ruby/sqlite interface. Do that with: gem install sqlite3 .
  8. At this point I was ready to run rails. I made a new app people by doing
    the following:

Yea!!! It worked.