Ruby packages are available for Windows, and they can be used to develop Ruby applications, all day long. However, they lack the necessary files to develop Ruby modules in C/C++ and unlike PHP, where you can fairly easily shoehorn the headers into an already-installed package, it's not so easy with Ruby. In fact, to get a hold of the components to shoehorn in, you have to do an entire build from source, so you might as well just do that to begin with.
Fortunately, it's not too difficult.
PrerequisitesFor this effort you will need:
- Microsoft Visual Studio
- The Ruby source code.
- A few unixish commands - gunzip and tar. These can be provided by a gnuwin32 installation, a cygwin installation.
- A text editor. Notepad or vi will do.
The Process
I last did this with Ruby 2.2.0, so I'll use it in this example.
The Ruby source code comes as a tar.gz file. There aren't any .zip files available, or if there are, I'm not sure where to find them. So you'll have to use some unixish commands to extract it.
Move the ruby sources to somewhere convenient and use the unix tools to extract it:
gunzip ruby-2.2.0.tar.gz
tar xf ruby-2.2.0
This should create a directory named ruby-2.2.0
Open the appropriate Visual Studio command prompt. If you plan on building a 32-bit version of Ruby, then open the x86 command prompt. If you plan on building a 64-bit version of Ruby, then open the x64 command prompt.
Navigate into the ruby-2.2.0 directory that was created by the extraction process above.
To get everything to compile and install correctly, I had to edit the file tool\rbinstall.rb and change line 714 to read:
rescue LoadError
This may or may not be necessary with a newer version of ruby, or the line to edit might be different.
Now, configure the build.
For a 64-bit build, run:
win32\configure.bat --prefix=C:\Ruby --target=x64-mswin64
For a 32-bit build, run:
win32\configure.bat --prefix=C:\Ruby --without-ext=fiddle
(The --without-ext=fiddle command just disables the "fiddle" extension, which I couldn't get to build on 32-bit Windows, for some reason. Your mileage may vary.)
To actually build Ruby, run:
nmake
(This will run for a while.)
When it's done, install Ruby by running:
nmake install
Everything should get installed under C:\Ruby
To make the ruby programs generally accessible, add C:\Ruby\bin to the system PATH as follows:
- Open the Control Panel
- Search for Environment
- Click the link for "Edit the system environment variables"
- Click "Environment Variables"
- In the System Variables pane, scroll down and click on Path
- Click Edit...
- Append: ;C:\Ruby\bin to the Variable Value.
- Click OK
- Click OK
- Click OK
And that's it. Ruby is now built, installed and accessible.
Hopefully this helps someone out.
Good luck developing your Ruby modules on Windows.
