I’ve pushed to RubyGems a version 0.4.beta3, you can access it from here

What’s new?

Bugsfixes, thanks to sinclair that fixed a couple of regressions due the refactoring and removal of win32-service dependency.

Please read the previous post about install and usage instructions. Thank you.

I just pushed to official gem repositories (Gemcutter) the newer version of mongrel_service

What’s new?

A few outstanding bugs has been fixed. A few patches from Daniel Gies and papillon and other stuff:

Removed win32-service dependency

Since win32-service used SEH, something only present in Visual C, newer builds of Ruby made with GCC cannot use it.

This change will make possible to depend on even less external stuff.

Remember: you still need administrative privileges to install or remove Windows Services.

Mongrel log files are written to the path specified by –log option

Yes, log files used to be written all in Ruby bin folder, this has now changed, thanks to Daniel Gies contribution.

This will happen automatically with the upgraded exectuable.

Workaround Windows 2008 process detection

It is now possible execute the service on any account besides LocalSystem. Contribution by Daniel Gies and papillon.

Wait longer for child process terminate properly

There are times some pending database connections are slow. With this change these will terminate smoothly now.

Nitty gritty

I took the time to cleanup the repository, folder structure and build process to make it more easy update this project in the future. Thanks Hoe and my own experience working with Rake.

How to install it?

Since this is a prerelease gem, you need to indicate the option during gem installation:

gem install mongrel_service --prerelease

Once installed, you can now install new services.

If you already have a service installed for your application, you will need to remove it and install it again for it to update the executable and adjust the service registry information.

The expected commands are mongrel_rails service::remove --name MyService and after issue mongrel_rails service::install --name MyService ...

Report bugs

If you find any problem with this newer build, please use GitHub issues since current Mongrel tracker is full of spam.

Please include servicefb.log, mongrel_service.log and mongrel.log generated when attempts to start or stop the service failed.

When to expect a final release

If no serious bug appears, expect a final 0.4 release next weekend.

Thanks all for the contributions and happy new year!

Update: Gems are not officially released, no need to add --source anymore.

Getting Ruby

These steps are the same for Ruby 1.9 or Ruby 1.8, please feel free to download the installer from here

For this guide I’m going to use Ruby 1.9.1-p129, since it the coolest new version that all the guys are playing with

Now, start a Command prompt with Ruby (under start menu, inside Ruby 1.9.1-p129).

Getting the right MySQL version

While building the MySQL/Ruby bindings, we found that mixing versions of the bindings with different versions of MySQL installations ended on undesired results (abnormal program termination, weird errors, etc.)

For this guide, and because we are going to use binary gems, we are going to stick to MySQL version 5.0.83.

Now is time to download MySQL. For this guide, I’m going to install the essentials version, which contains only MySQL and command line tools, no Query Builder or any other administrative tool.

Please go to this page and download Windows Essentials (x86). Once downloaded you will end with mysql-essential-5.0.83-win32.msi file. Execute it and install with defaults.

Configure MySQL

If you’re an advanced and savvy MySQL user, you can skip the following steps. For the sake of this guide, I’m going to list the simple options you must follow when installing it.

Once you installed MySQL, the installer should have started the Configuration Wizard page.

Inside of it, please apply the following options:

Once done with all this, on the summary screen, please click Execute to complete the configuration of MySQL Server.

Under some system, starting of MySQL server will fail during this wizard, but don’t be afraid, most of the times, this can be safely ignored.

To check everything was properly installed, please go to the Start Menu, and inside MySQL Server 5.0, click on MySQL Command Line Client

If you changed the root password, or, like me, leaved it unchecked, you can simply press enter when asked for the password and see that the server is running!

If you decided to add MySQL to the PATH, you will require to restart your computer so the PATH change is available to the system.

If you decided not to add MySQL to the PATH, please go, with Explorer to the location where you installed MySQL Server and copy libmySQL.dll into C:\Ruby19\bin

In my case, I found this file in C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.0\bin

Now, it is time to install the bindings.

Getting MySQL/Ruby

For this version of Ruby, there is no official binary gems for both Ruby 1.8 and 1.9. So we are going to install the specially built version from RubyInstaller gems repository.

At the Command Prompt with Ruby, please enter the following command:

gem install mysql

This is going to install the special version of MySQL bindings. This version works with Ruby 1.8 and 1.9, since bundles fat binaries. You should expect a similar output like this:

Successfully installed mysql-2.8.1.1-x86-mingw32
1 gem installed

Getting Rails

Now is time to install Rails and build our application. At the same command prompt, please enter the following command:

gem install rails

This is going to take a bit, since Rails and it’s dependencies takes around 2MB or so, and need to be downloaded and installed.

Once done, expect see at the screen something like this:

Successfully installed activesupport-2.3.2
Successfully installed activerecord-2.3.2
Successfully installed actionpack-2.3.2
Successfully installed actionmailer-2.3.2
Successfully installed activeresource-2.3.2
Successfully installed rails-2.3.2
6 gems installed

Creating a Rails application

Let’s name our application mysqlapp

rails mysqlapp --database=mysql

The --database option indicates to Rails that we want to use MySQL instead of the default database adapter (SQLite3).

Rails will output a lot of lines when creating your application structure, just an excerpt of what to see:

...
      create  config/database.yml
      create  config/routes.rb
      create  config/locales/en.yml
      create  config/initializers/backtrace_silencers.rb
      create  config/initializers/inflections.rb
      create  config/initializers/mime_types.rb
      create  config/initializers/new_rails_defaults.rb
      create  config/initializers/session_store.rb
      create  config/environment.rb
...

Configuring our Database

Now Rails have configured for us the name of the database we want to use, and you can verify it in config\database.yml

Rails will try to connect to mysqlapp_development, but that database do not exist in our fresh new MySQL server.

So, let’s create it:

cd mysqlapp
rake db:create

Just that, simple db:create is going to connect to our MySQL server, and create the database for us.

Keep in mind that if you changed root password or want to use other MySQL user to connect to the database, you need to edit database.yml to reflect those changes.

Let’s verify that everything is in place, using the following command:

ruby script\about

And you should see something like this as result:

About your application's environment
Ruby version              1.9.1 (i386-mingw32)
RubyGems version          1.3.4
Rack version              1.0 bundled
Rails version             2.3.2
Active Record version     2.3.2
Action Pack version       2.3.2
Active Resource version   2.3.2
Action Mailer version     2.3.2
Active Support version    2.3.2
Application root          C:/Users/Luis/mysqlapp
Environment               development
Database adapter          mysql
Database schema version   0

Now is up to you to create your models, controllers and views!

Some notes and considerations

On other post I’m going to guide you with steps on building the bindings against MySQL 5.1.36, since you will need to install the Ruby Development Kit and the development headers for MySQL.

If you find something wrong with the Ruby Installer, please report it here, but issues with your code, Rails or other are not responsability of RubyInstaller.

The binary gems provided at gems.rubyinstaller.org are based on our forks of mysql bindings, which can be cloned and explored here at GitHub.

Keep in mind that some gems would not work under Ruby 1.9, or you will need a compiler (DevKit) for it. See previous post with details how to get those from our download page.

So, here we go

Update: Gems are not officially released, no need to add --source anymore.

First, Getting Ruby

Please download from here one of the preview1 installers for Ruby.

For this demonstration, I’m going to use Ruby 1.9.1-p129. Downloaded, executed and installed to it’s default location C:\Ruby19

Now, start a Command prompt with Ruby (under start menu, inside Ruby 1.9.1-p129).

Getting SQLite3

As you may know, Windows do not came out of the box with libraries like SQLite3. For this, we are going to download it from Internet.

Going to SQLite downloads, under Precompiled binaries for Windows, download sqlitedll-3_6_16.zip and sqlite-3_6_16.zip. Those two packages contains the DLL (sqlite3.dll) and the command line executable for SQLite (sqlite3.exe).

Please extract those contents inside C:\Ruby19\bin

Now, let’s get the Ruby bindings for SQLite3

Getting SQLite3/Ruby bindings

As you may know, the preferred way to distribute Ruby libraries is using Gems. Users on other platforms usually compile themselves these components, using the mechanisms provided by the operating system distribution.

We are going to avoid the compilation process using pre-compiled binaries that has been cooked for us.

So, back to the Command Prompt with Ruby, let’s install the sqlite3 bindings:

gem install sqlite3-ruby

Adding --source help us indicate a non-standard location from where gems are going to be installed. RubyInstaller team has built and packaged special versions of these gems that we hope get published soon into RubyForge, the official place for gem distribution.

Once installed, you should see something like this at the screen:

Successfully installed sqlite3-ruby-1.2.4.1-x86-mingw32
1 gem installed

These special version of the gem are fat binaries, which means these can be safely installed on Ruby 1.8.6 or 1.9.1.

Getting Rails

Now it’s time to install and build a Rails application. First, let’s install the rails gem:

gem install rails

That command is going to take a bit, since is a 2MB or so download, and will install several of the Rails dependencies (ActiveRecord, ActionPack, ActiveSupport, etc). You should expect similar output to this:

Successfully installed activesupport-2.3.2
Successfully installed activerecord-2.3.2
Successfully installed actionpack-2.3.2
Successfully installed actionmailer-2.3.2
Successfully installed activeresource-2.3.2
Successfully installed rails-2.3.2
6 gems installed

Let’s build our application now.

Creating a Rails application.

Let’s call the application railsapp

rails railsapp

An excerpt of the output you should get:

      create
      create  app/controllers
      create  app/helpers
      create  app/models
      create  app/views/layouts
      create  config/environments
      create  config/initializers
      create  config/locales
      create  db
...

Rails 2.3.2 defaults it’s database format to SQLite3, so there is no need for us to tweak anything.

Checking if everything is ok, using script\about:

cd railsapp
ruby script\about

And the output should be something like this:

About your application's environment
Ruby version              1.9.1 (i386-mingw32)
RubyGems version          1.3.4
Rack version              1.0 bundled
Rails version             2.3.2
Active Record version     2.3.2
Action Pack version       2.3.2
Active Resource version   2.3.2
Action Mailer version     2.3.2
Active Support version    2.3.2
Application root          C:/Users/Luis/railsapp
Environment               development
Database adapter          sqlite3
Database schema version   0

Now, it’s up to you create your models, controllers and everything.

Some notes and considerations.

At the time of this writing, Mongrel has not been updated to build and install properly either on 1.9 or MinGW versions of Ruby.

As part of Mongrel development team, I’m going to work on a solution for this in the upcoming days.

If you find something wrong with the Ruby Installer, please report here, but issues with your code, Rails or other are not responsability of RubyInstaller.

The binary gems provided at gems.rubyinstaller.org are based on our forks of sqlite3-ruby, which can be cloned and explored here at GitHub.

Keep in mind that some gems would not work under Ruby 1.9, or you will need a compiler (DevKit) for it. See previous post with details how to get those from our download page.

No matter if you’re running on Windows, Linux, OSX, an esoteric version of Unix, you can still count with support¹

Well, skipping for a second the zealots of platforms, I’ll like to comment on two things that happened in the past days.

Pure-Ruby Zlib

Daniel Berger started a bounty to workaround a issue with zlib building and working with Visual C++ 8.0

The full thread is here at ruby-talk.

While his work on getting a working Ruby on VC8 overlaps our work on MinGW build, the bounty will not only benefit him in the quest but the whole Ruby community.

A couple of days, when I thought the bounty was not attracting attention, 2 participants showed interest.

Both developers came with different approaches to the problem and one goal: contribute back.

To quote Charles own words:

Thanks Luis, but never mind, it was more about the challenge, and also supporting the effort to ease problems on windows. I primarily use ruby on windows, and make use of the fruits of your (one click installer), and daniel berger’s (win32 process, sys-*, et al) labors every day (at work that is . Props to you guys for making ruby on windows usable…

I don’t need to add anything else, or should I?

Keep trying Windows configurations.

I know, I know, this can be a bit biased (hint: I use Windows), but Fabio Akita did it again:

The Best Environment for Rails on Windows

First he published that in Portuguese, and after several comments he got convinced there was a market for a translation.

The tips for gVim setup are great, which is a nice way to share with the community how you can get productive without dumping your whole setup, going to a memory and wallet blown IDE or dumping your computer for a Mac.

What is the point?

I know Fabio and he is a Mac user. Even so, he is pretty aware that there are users that cannot afford get a Mac, or cannot switch to Linux environments. He took the time to write not one but two posts covering details on how you can be productive on Windows for doing Ruby and Rails development.

This is the example on how the community is great around the language, and that a few opinionated developers and their statements are not the way to measure the attitude of the community.

Got it?

Closing

And for those who complain about gems not install properly on Windows, send the gem author to rake-compiler and tell them they no longer have an excuse.

¹ ruby-talk support, ruby-core still shows some communication problems.

‘gem update –system’ is not really updating?

Sometimes RubyGems, like any software, get confused. Help him find it’s way. Becca Girl at ruby-talk found this problem (read it here).

I suggest that, if after a gem update you get some weird errors or the same old version when query for gem -v, don’t waste your time and proceed with the following:

1. Download latest rubygems source package from here (zip format recommended).
2. Extract the package contents somewhere (a new folder close to your root C:/ or D:/ will be a good option).
3. Jump into the command line and disable RUBYOPT (set RUBYOPT=)
4. cd into the folder you extracted RubyGems and run ruby setup.rb install
5. Done!.

Now you should have the updated version of RubyGems (check with gem -v).

What about ‘rake.bat:24: undefined method’ errors or something like that?

If you updated from a release of RubyGems previous 0.9.4, you will see that some of your previous gems will show these problems, mostly due some deprecations and changes in the way batch files are generated.

An advice: sweep your gems!

1. Remove offending gem: gem uninstall rake
2. confirm removal of rake executable
3. Install gem again: gem install rake

Starting from RubyGems 1.1 and enhanced in 1.2, perform updates and install of new gems is faster, so thank all the RubyGems team for making you have more tiem to actual coding instead of performing updates!

And what about mongrel?

Jumping form 0.9.4 to 1.1 version of RubyGems broke binaries of mongrel in Windows (as commented in previous post here)

At this time you should have no problems, but if still find them, don’t hesitate to search mongrel-users mailing list (using Ruby-Forum) to find or post if new issues.

Two in distress makes sorrow less

Even I know there is no consolation in saying that Windows users are not the only one facing problems with RubyGems, I can only conclude that no matter which OS is your preference, each one will have it’s own glitches that will make you love or hate your platform.

Anyway, enough for today.

PS: Are you ready for Rails Summit Latin America?

The recommended update procedure will be:

1. Update RubyGems using gem update --system
2. Go into your lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems and rename mongrel_service-0.3.3-mswin32 to mongrel_service-0.3.3-x86-mswin32 (note the x86 addition).
3. Star mongrel_rails normally.

The problem is related to gem_plugin and how it determines de platform path. Also, reinstalling the gem shows other problems with dependencies trying to get compiled. I’ll solve them and do a proper release later today.

Back to the informative post

It seems a lot of folks are upgrading their Rails installation. For the Windows-only guys out there: please wait.

I just hope all the Ruby folks on Windows don’t get mad at me¹.

My fingers start hurting replying mails and closing duplicate tickets about this, so, making a short list of it:

1. Rails 2.0.x forces you update to RubyGems 0.9.5
2. RubyGems 0.9.5 is broken for platforms that provides pre-built gems.
3. Mongrel provides a pre-built gem for those who don’t have a compiler under Windows (90% of the cases).
4. Even you get Rails installed, it wouldn’t boot, since it couldn’t get Mongrel running.
5. Folks start yelling at ruby-talk, mongrel-users and other places about this.

Please, hold your anxiety a bit

• Rails guys did fix this (changeset 8438)
• A new Rails release (2.0.3 maybe?) is comming soon.
• A new RubyGems version that fix this scenario is comming soon too (1.0)
• Mongrel and all the gems related to it (mongrel, mongrel_service and fastthread) are being fixed to solve further issues with this bad behavior

Why this chaos?

Chaos is everywhere, and some times is good.

But honestly, this global break is a necessity: upcoming version of Ruby (1.9.1) will ship with RubyGems bundled. Part of this decision required automatic handling of platforms — remember the 6 or more listed gems for platforms you don’t care about? — the same is gone for good.

Automatic platform handling to cover all the platforms, OS and compilers Ruby run is complex. Some gems developers (including myself) were using the wrong platform to identify native pre-built gems. This also covers others gems like sqlite, mysql and ruby-debug to name a few.

This should have been fixed before, but 9K gems rubyforge provides is kind of difficult to track which one will break, don’t you think?

Anyway, just a simple summary of the situation.

¹ Is not all my fault, ok?