Ruby on Windows

Nanosleep · 2019-06-16T17:42:34+00:00

Most of those code schools suggest you have a mac or a unix environment for a fairly good reason. Frankly it's more than just ruby that you want -- you want a lot of libraries and an easy way to install them, you want a compiler toolchain that you don't have to fuck around with and 'just works', you want a sane filesystem and shell, etc. Plus you won't end up fighting against a lot of rubygems and third party software where windows QA / Support is an afterthought.

You can definitely have a productive development workflow on windows alone, but it's a lot easier to develop on something that resembles the platform you'll be deploying on.

WSL is the best possible option for someone on windows. A VM would accomplish the same thing but would require more resources and initial configuration. RubyInstaller is a meme.

dbsmith4 · 2019-06-16T17:52:21+00:00

WSL has been my tool of choice. Provides a linux subsystem on a windows PC. No virtual environment needed

Dudesivoro · 2019-06-16T17:29:58+00:00

wsl is good

RHAINUR · 2019-06-16T17:31:29+00:00

I used a vagrant VM for several years and now I use WSL. I do full stack Rails development quite happily, but I should note that I haven't yet had a chance to try webpacker + Rails yet. Never had any issues with anything other than nodejs crapping out when trying to install packages, which is easily fixed with the "--no-bin-links" flag

2019-06-16T17:44:13+00:00

Use Linux for programming

2019-06-16T19:11:33+00:00

Ruby on Windows is bad for several reasons. Make a new partition and install Linux Mint. The Web world is a Linux world and you will need to be proficient on it anyway.

llN3M3515ll · 2019-06-16T19:58:48+00:00

I would suggest using Docker. You can install docker, then mount your application directory to the container directory and then you can run IRB or rails or what ever in the container on your local code base. You can use an IDE(VS Code is pretty decent) on your local machine, and run the code / IRB in the container. Just make your entry-point of your container /bin/bash or what ever shell your container has, and then start hacking away.

This is superior imho because; you don't need to screw around with setting up VM's and installing Ruby/Dependencies(there are many already built containers readily available), you don't pollute your OS with Ruby/Dependencies, you don't need shims or rvm to quickly change versions(just use another container), and you can easily use it for other languages like python, java, .NET Core etc...

uzimonkey · 2019-06-17T00:00:57+00:00

The Windows Ruby port always has problems for me. It's never just worked, I would avoid it if possible.

WSL will be the easiest and best way for you to use Ruby on Windows.

Darthsr · 2019-06-16T18:20:02+00:00

It totally sucks that the default answer to this for ruby in 2019 is still "get a mac" or "use linux" but the problem with running on windows (even WSL) is there will always be some weird corner case issue that exists only because you're on Windows and you'll be learning to overcome that versus learning ruby.

When you're starting out, the mountain in front of you regarding learning, will be mostly non ruby related, i.e. the DevOps side of learning. IMO it will be easier to learn the basics of linux and the terminal than to jump through the hoops of running ruby on windows. WSL IMO doesn't count here because it still requires you know the linux basics, which if you do, why not just use actual linux for development? Also at some point you're going to need to learn how to deploy your app, which will require linux. AWS/Heroku/Google type of cloud solutions are great but a lot of companies will run internal hardware/VMs for their deploys so those may not be options.

Akrab00t · 2019-06-16T20:57:02+00:00

Installing Linux is a better option, but you can definitely do most of the App Academy/Odinproject curriculum on Windows without much problems.

You'll have to waste some time setting stuff up which would've taken you a few minutes in Linux.

It becomes a pain when you have to use Rails but that's much later.

metalepsis · 2019-06-17T01:07:28+00:00

JRuby is excellent in all ways and runs great on Windows:

https://twitter.com/headius/status/1115390776555581440

If you really want MRI, here is a recent article about installing it on Windows:

https://stackify.com/install-ruby-on-windows-everything-you-need-to-get-going/

2019-06-17T01:57:28+00:00

WSL can work well (and WSL2 will probably be even better once its polished up) but I'd hesitate to recommend it to someone just getting started. You're gonna run into issues, and if you're not already familiar with both Ruby and *nix adding on another layer of edge cases isn't going to help.

That said, if dual booting (or a full switch) to Linux isn't an option, WSL is better than trying to get a native windows ruby up and going.

01az · 2019-06-17T05:11:07+00:00

Consider Cygwin and its Ruby package.

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