Limitations in running Ruby/Rails on windows

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Here’s an overview of the current issues with Rails on Windows:

  • Ruby and Rails are slower on Windows than they are on Unix-like OS’s.
  • A few gems and libraries don’t work on Windows.
  • Some Unix-isms aren’t available on Windows (examples).
  • The community is mostly on either Mac or Linux (This is a particularly hard one to deal with; nobody wants to be alone on one island when the rest of the tribe are partying, having fun and getting along great over on the other island. Community is important. It seems that most Windows developers that start with Rails quickly switch to a Mac or Linux. However, the small community of Windows Ruby users that do persist are extremely friendly, dedicated and knowledgeable – go say hi.)

Note much of the advice that follows is now outdated due to the magnificent efforts of the RubyInstaller team in bringing stability, compatibility and performance to Ruby on Windows. I no longer have to use VirtualBox, which says a lot about how far Ruby on Windows has come.

If you want more technical detail, the following are required reading. :

Choice quote from that last one is:

AkitaOnRails: The most obvious thing is that any Gem with C Extensions without proper binaries for Windows will fail. Trying to execute shell commands will fail and RubyInline as well. What else?

Luis Lavena: Hehe, that’s just the tip of the iceberg

Having said all that, I don’t find developing with Rails on Windows too painful. Using Ruby is, for the most part, a pleasure. I’d avoid InstantRails because, to be frank, it’s just as easy to install Ruby properly using the one-click installer, then doing a gem install rails. If you need Apache and MySQL, WAMP is a good bet, although even these aren’t required if you just stick with Mongrel and SQLite.

What I’ve taken to doing recently is running VirtualBox with an instance of Ubuntu Server that closely mirrors the deployment server. I map a network drive to the Ubuntu Server, then I edit and run my code directly on the VM. It uses hardly any memory (it’s currently using ~43MB; contrast that with Firefox, which is using ~230MB) and Rails actually performs better than running it natively on Windows. Plus you can experiment with your virtual server in relative safety. It’s a really nice setup, I highly recommend it.

Finally, here are a couple of Ruby/Rails blogs aimed at Windows users:

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