Ruby installation
Let’s start from Ruby installation. We can download Windows One-Click Installer from http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=167, for example ruby186-27_rc2.exe
During installation, make sure that you select at least “Enable RubyGems” option:
You can leave default installation folder (C:\Ruby).
Ones you finish installation, you can run both “ruby” and “gem” from withing your command line.
So it’s time to install Rails, just type in command prompt:
and wait few minutes to finish installation.
JRuby installation
Download installation package from http://jruby.org/download. We will need binary Windows version, for example JRuby 1.4.0RC1 Binary .zip. Extract folder content to C:\JRuby folder and add path to the JRuby to your PATH variable:
Let’s test installation:
Now both Ruby and JRuby installed.
The problems starts when we will try to simultaneously use them (side by side)… First of all, make sure that you delete RUBYOPT environment variable (because it seems like JRuby gems did not work correctly if this variable setup). Now you can invoke each “gem” using following commands:
For Ruby: ruby -S gem
For JRuby: jruby -S gem
For example this is what I get on my machine:
Note: it is actually not a big problem that I had 2 different versions of Gem on my machine – both versions (1.3.1 and 1.3.5 works well for me… update of gem 1.3.1 fails for some reasons on my machine, so I decide to leave this for now…)
One small thing to do: it is possible that you have old version 1.3.1 of RubyGems like me (in the moment when I write this, latest version is 1.3.5 like was installed for JRuby). If we leave it, we can face some problems in future with IDEA etc, so let’s just update it:
Also, let’s install jruby-openssl (IDEA generate Error if this gem not installed):
Rails Installation
Next step is installation of Rails – just type following commands (it is better to just install Rails twice than to share same installation for both Ruby and JRuby):
ruby -S gem install rails
jruby -S gem install rails
EvejobRoR and EvejobRoRG Project
We going to create 2 separate projects now:
EvejobRoR – will use Rails build in ActiveRecord + MySQL database
EvejobRoRG – will use App Engine hosting, datastore and Google Accounts for user authentication APIs
Let’s start from more simple EvejobRoR:
cd c:\evejob
rails EvejobRoR -d mysql
Now let’s open this “template” project in IDEA:
File -> New Project -> Create project from scratch:
Change here “Project files location” to the “C:\evejob\EvejobRoR”, select “Ruby Module” and press next (see screenshot above)
Now you need to specify the Ruby SDK (current version of IDEA can’t detect SDK locations from environment variables). Press “Configure…” button and press “+” button in “Configure JDK” window:
Select “Ruby SDK” in popup and than select Ruby interpreter path:
I Hope you will get something like this:
If so, just press “OK” and continue IDEA project creation Wizard:
Select “Ruby on Rails” on next screen and press “More…” for Rails Facet configuration:
Make sure that you select “Use existing Rails application” and “Preconfigure for selected database” to “mysql” like (see picture above)
Now fill free to finish project creation Wizard. Done! We get EvejobRoR project loaded into IDEA.
Same steps we need to made for EvejobRoRG project, with small difference that this time we need to add JRuby SDK, instead of Ruby SDK like before and that we don’t want to support mysql as we are going to use Google App Engine API instead.
So, first type:
cd c:\evejob
rails EvejobRoRG
Then same like before, create new project in IDEA, put here “C:\evejob\EvejobRoRG” path and in “Specify the Ruby SDK” press “Configure…” and add JRuby SDK:
After made same steps like was done for EvejobRoR project, just make sure that you unselect “Preconfigure for selected database” check box in Rails Facet Settings dialog and process steps like before to finish Wizard.
Hopefully you get EvejobRoRG project opened in IDEA!
Prepare JRuby / Rails for Google App Engine
Google App Engine runs Java applications, so we need to make sure that we can assemble our JRails applications into a Java Web Archive (.war). To do such tasks easy, let’s first install “warbler” gem:
jruby -S gem install warbler
Now it is time to check that you add Java JDK path to windows PATH environment variable (because “warbler” gem use JDK):
Next step, to run following commands from application root folder (c:\evejob\EvejobRoRG):
jruby -S warble pluginize
jruby -S warble config
(make sure you type “warble”, not “warbler” that is just Gem name)
Now you can just check that “Warbler” works:
As result you must see EvejobRoRG.war file generated in application root folder (c:\evejob\EvejobRoRG)
We can’t use this .war file directly for Google App Engine for few reasons, but at least we see that we can get some .war file 
I specially not use all appengine-jruby project gems for few reasons:
- google-appengine gem install own “tuned” version of JRuby that we want to avoid for reasons, for example for quick updates as we don’t want to depend on this special version of JRuby etc (means that project must be installed using Ruby, not JRuby! And only after installation it download and install customized, ‘frozen’ version of JRuby)
- google-appengine helps to run JRuby on Google App Engine, but not to run Rails on Google App Engine ! All problems related to Rails on App Engine are still exists (read more at http://code.google.com/p/appengine-jruby/wiki/RunningRails)
But what I do use is one of the gems from appengine-ruby project – “appengine-apis”, so let’s install it:
jruby -S gem install appengine-apis
Read this for now to get more information about Rails and Google App Engine specific things:
http://olabini.com/blog/2009/04/jruby-on-rails-on-google-app-engine/
http://www.railshacks.com/2009/4/25/run-your-ruby-on-rails-app-on-google-app-engine
We will get back to this later…
