From Zero to Rails3 on Windows in 600 seconds

[Update:

Quite a lot has changed since this post was written. See Another Go with Rails 3 on Windows for a more up to date Rails 3 on Windows guide.

]

Some Prep Work

Download and install the following:

• msysgit (Git for Windows) I'm using Git-1.6.5.1-preview20091022.exe
• Ruby 1.9.1 I'm using rubyinstaller-1.9.1-p243-rc1.exe (Make sure to select the option to add Ruby\bin to your path)
• Sqlite3 dll extract this into the bin directory of your newly created Ruby installation (c:\ruby\bin or c:\ruby19\bin)

That probably took about 300 seconds so we'd better get moving...

Showtime

Create a new directory for your rails app. Avoid spaces in the path. I'll be using c:\Rails3App Create a file called Gemfile in the root of your new directory with the following content:

gem "rails", git: "git://github.com/rails/rails.git"
git "git://github.com/rails/arel.git"
git "git://github.com/rails/rack.git"

require 'symlink' #hack to help bundler do it's thing on windows

#continue with other gems
gem 'rspec'
gem 'sqlite3-ruby'

Now create another file in the same directory called symlink.rb with the following:

require 'FileUtils'
# File.symlink hack (no symlink on windows)
class File
  def File.symlink(a,b)
    FileUtils.cp_r(a,b,:preserve => false)
  end
end

(Bundler depends on symlink which isn't implemented on Windows. This file provides a work around.)
Now open cmd.exe and cd to your new rails app directory:

cd c:\Rails3App

Install the new fangled bundler gem:

gem install bundler

Say the magic words:

gem bundle

Wait another 120 seconds and poof! You've installed Rails3. It's not installed like a normal gem though. Bundler put all of those gems directly inside this directory so to use rails type

bin\rails . -s

This uses the vendored rails gem to fill out the rest of the rails app in the current directory. Now when you view the contents of c:\Rails3App you will see a brand new rails3 application. You should be able to start up your new application like normal:

ruby script\server

The End

Give it a test run. This is still 3.0 pre alpha code so expect some hiccups but man, that was much easier than you thought it would be, right?

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