Rails development environment installer for Windows.
The goal of this project is to generate an installer that when run installs all of the most common components for a Rails development environment with no required prerequisites on a Windows system.
RailsInstaller project code repository is located on GitHub and is bootstrapped, built and packaged via rake tasks.
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Download and install the latest RailsInstaller.
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Download and install latest Inno Setup Quick Start Pack, ensure iscc.exe is in your PATH.
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Fork the RailsInstaller project on github into your own github account.
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Open the RailsInstaller Command prompt from the start menu RailsInstaller group and change directories to where you like to keep your projects.
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Clone your fork of the project.
git clone git@github.com:{{your github user name}}/railsinstaller-windows
cd railsinstaller-windows
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Update from origin master branch and checkout a new topic branch for your feature/bugfix.
git checkout master
git pull origin master
git checkout -b mybranchname
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Bootstrap the project. From the project root run:
rake bootstrap
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Implement your new feature and/or fix your bug in your newly forked Railsinstaller project code.
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The configuration file for specifying required packages can be found at config/railsinstaller.yml.
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Building of the installer into the stage path for packaging is implemented by Ruby code in the lib/ directory, starting with the file lib/railsinstaller/actions.rb.
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Methods called by the actions.rb file are implemented by lib/railsinstaller/methods.rb.
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Next build all components onto the stage (into the stage/ directory).
rake build
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We are now ready to use Inno Setup to package the installer into an executable (.exe) for testing/distribution.
rake package
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This creates the executable (.exe) package file in the pkg/ directory from the files staged during the build process in the stage/ directory.
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NOTE - You can run the package task with --trace for debugging output if the package fails to build or if you simply want to see what is being done as it is done).
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Once you have verified your new feature/bug-fix, push your branch up to GitHub.
git commit -a -m "Implemented featureX/bugfixX which ..."
git push origin mybranchname
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Now issue a pull request on GitHub.
The next few sections detail the core components that make up RailsInstaller.
RubyInstaller is a self contained package installer which installs Ruby and RubyGems on a windows system, head over to http://rubyinstaller.org/ for more information.
A MSYS/MinGW based toolkit that enables RailsInstaller to build native C/C++ packages, both for Ruby and gems. DevKit is built and maintained by the wonderful folks over at the RubyInstaller (http://rubyinstaller.org/) project.
The git version that is bundled into RailsInstaller is msysgit.
We are using Inno Setup, a free installer for Windows programs.