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ruby-on-railsrubygemswindows-xpredcloth

Ruby DevKit not working for RedCloth and other gems on WindowsXP

I'm a completely new to RoR and don't have much web development experience. I usually give up at this point, but I need a RoR dev environment for a job and I can't pick the brain of the site's creator because he's someone outside of the company and made it clear that he's completely unfamiliar with Windows (he develops on a mac and I'm starting to see why...). This is my first time posting so be kind...

Goal: Be able to view a RoR based site on local machine, preferably using a pre-existing XAMMP Server, but using the rails server would be fine too.

Environment: Windows XP Xammp 1.7.3 Ruby 9.1.2 DevKit 4.5.0.

What I've tried: I started with following the directions in this tutorial (Install Xampp and Rails on a Windows Machine http://www.grapethinking.com/getting-rails-to-work-on-a-windows-machine-running-xampp). I got through all the steps successfully and was able to create a rails app and see the "Welcome Aboard" page.

I got a local copy of the site off of heroku (http://heroku.com/), the ror hosting service that they use. I modified the apache configuration file to point to the public folder of the site as described in step 5 of the Xampp and Rails tutorial. At this point I got the following message when going to localhost:3000

Access forbidden!

You don't have permission to access the requested directory. There is either no index document or the directory is read-protected.

If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster.
Error 403
localhost
11/4/2010 2:19:12 PM
Apache/2.2.14 (Win32) DAV/2 mod_ssl/2.2.14 OpenSSL/0.9.8l mod_autoindex_color PHP/5.3.1 mod_apreq2-20090110/2.7.1 mod_perl/2.0.4 Perl/v5.10.1

I wasn't sure how to change permissions on a windows machine or if this was even the problem. I tried running "rails s" which complained:

Could not find RedCloth-4.2.3 in any of the sources, Try running 'bundle install'.

So I found this post which described my situation (http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/204455) which led to me downloading the DevKit. At this point I uninstalled ruby and reinstalled it with the correct installer. I installed the devkit following the instructions on their site (https://github.com/oneclick/rubyinstaller/wiki/Development-Kit).

The DevKit is not working. The config.yml file automagically had the location where I installed ruby (in ....xampp/ruby/Ruby192) and it ran without complaining, except during step 5 where you test to see if it actually worked with the command "gem install rdiscount --platform=ruby" which produced the following error:

C:\RubyDevKit>gem install rdiscount --platform=ruby
Temporarily enhancing PATH to include DevKit...
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing rdiscount:
        ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

"C:/Documents and Settings/Lyla/My Documents/new/XAMPP_Server_2010/XAMPP_Install
/xampp/ruby/Ruby192/bin/ruby.exe" extconf.rb
checking for random()... *** extconf.rb failed ***
Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of
necessary libraries and/or headers.  Check the mkmf.log file for more
details.  You may need configuration options.

Provided configuration options:
        --with-opt-dir
        --without-opt-dir
        --with-opt-include
        --without-opt-include=${opt-dir}/include
        --with-opt-lib
        --without-opt-lib=${opt-dir}/lib
        --with-make-prog
        --without-make-prog
        --srcdir=.
        --curdir
        --ruby=C:/Documents and Settings/Lyla/My Documents/new/XAMPP_Server_2010
/XAMPP_Install/xampp/ruby/Ruby192/bin/ruby
        --with-rdiscount-dir
        --without-rdiscount-dir
        --with-rdiscount-include
        --without-rdiscount-include=${rdiscount-dir}/include
        --with-rdiscount-lib
        --without-rdiscount-lib=${rdiscount-dir}/lib
C:/Documents and Settings/Lyla/My Documents/new/XAMPP_Server_2010/XAMPP_Install/
xampp/ruby/Ruby192/lib/ruby/1.9.1/mkmf.rb:368:in `try_do': The complier failed t
o generate an executable file. (RuntimeError)
You have to install development tools first.
        from C:/Documents and Settings/Lyla/My Documents/new/XAMPP_Server_2010/X
AMPP_Install/xampp/ruby/Ruby192/lib/ruby/1.9.1/mkmf.rb:435:in `try_link0'
        from C:/Documents and Settings/Lyla/My Documents/new/XAMPP_Server_2010/X
AMPP_Install/xampp/ruby/Ruby192/lib/ruby/1.9.1/mkmf.rb:440:in `try_link'
        from C:/Documents and Settings/Lyla/My Documents/new/XAMPP_Server_2010/X
AMPP_Install/xampp/ruby/Ruby192/lib/ruby/1.9.1/mkmf.rb:552:in `try_func'
        from C:/Documents and Settings/Lyla/My Documents/new/XAMPP_Server_2010/X
AMPP_Install/xampp/ruby/Ruby192/lib/ruby/1.9.1/mkmf.rb:797:in `block in have_fun
c'
        from C:/Documents and Settings/Lyla/My Documents/new/XAMPP_Server_2010/X
AMPP_Install/xampp/ruby/Ruby192/lib/ruby/1.9.1/mkmf.rb:693:in `block in checking
_for'
        from C:/Documents and Settings/Lyla/My Documents/new/XAMPP_Server_2010/X
AMPP_Install/xampp/ruby/Ruby192/lib/ruby/1.9.1/mkmf.rb:280:in `block (2 levels)
in postpone'
        from C:/Documents and Settings/Lyla/My Documents/new/XAMPP_Server_2010/X
AMPP_Install/xampp/ruby/Ruby192/lib/ruby/1.9.1/mkmf.rb:254:in `open'
        from C:/Documents and Settings/Lyla/My Documents/new/XAMPP_Server_2010/X
AMPP_Install/xampp/ruby/Ruby192/lib/ruby/1.9.1/mkmf.rb:280:in `block in postpone
'
        from C:/Documents and Settings/Lyla/My Documents/new/XAMPP_Server_2010/X
AMPP_Install/xampp/ruby/Ruby192/lib/ruby/1.9.1/mkmf.rb:254:in `open'
        from C:/Documents and Settings/Lyla/My Documents/new/XAMPP_Server_2010/X
AMPP_Install/xampp/ruby/Ruby192/lib/ruby/1.9.1/mkmf.rb:276:in `postpone'
        from C:/Documents and Settings/Lyla/My Documents/new/XAMPP_Server_2010/X
AMPP_Install/xampp/ruby/Ruby192/lib/ruby/1.9.1/mkmf.rb:692:in `checking_for'
        from C:/Documents and Settings/Lyla/My Documents/new/XAMPP_Server_2010/X
AMPP_Install/xampp/ruby/Ruby192/lib/ruby/1.9.1/mkmf.rb:796:in `have_func'
        from extconf.rb:5:in `<main>'


Gem files will remain installed in C:/Documents and Settings/Lyla/My Documents/n
ew/XAMPP_Server_2010/XAMPP_Install/xampp/ruby/Ruby192/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/r
discount-1.6.5 for inspection.
Results logged to C:/Documents and Settings/Lyla/My Documents/new/XAMPP_Server_2
010/XAMPP_Install/xampp/ruby/Ruby192/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/rdiscount-1.6.5/ex
t/gem_make.out

So it does have the "Temporarily enhancing PATH to include DevKit..." but nothing else works. A similar error occurs when trying to install RedCloth.

I found this post which seems very related, but it's for getting dbd-odbc gem, whatever that is, to work and the solution seems somewhat specific to that: I can't get the ruby development kit working for Windows XP

I wasn't sure what he was talking about with the modifying the fstab file...maybe that would help me? Unfortunately I can't find the fstab file, I don't have a msys folder in my devkit root folder. I can't find gcc.bat, make.bat, or sh.bat in my ruby install's bin folder or in the various bin folders in devkit.

There's also this post (http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/186191) which suggests some stuff I can't really follow...it's also all from 2009 so I figured it might be old.

help and thank you!

Solution

  • To be completely honest, I would actually not bother with setting it up on Windows. It can be completely unmanageable and beyond frustrating at times (I know this from experience). There is a reason that there is a very small community of Rails developers that use Windows. Most everyone else uses OS X or a flavor of Linux.

    Create an Ubuntu virtual machine with something like VirtualBox (free) and set up the Rails stack on there. It's a much more pain-free environment, and you won't look back. Alternatively, if you don't want to do all the setup yourself, use the BitNami RubyStack. It's a preconfigured Ruby/Rails environment that you can either use as a virtual machine, or install on your computer (I'd opt for the former).

    Hope that helps!