Software Development | Ruby on Rails
Installing Aptana RadRails on Windows

RadRails is pretty easy to install and use with InstantRails.

  1. Download from RadRails and follow installation instructions
  2. Change the Ruby path to point to the version in InstantRails, e.g. C:\InstantRails-2.0\ruby
  3. Switch the working directory to point to your rails_apps directory. In RadRails select File > Switch Workspace... then browse to C:\InstantRails-2.0\rails_apps.

The problem with ruby-debug

Ruby-debug is not windows friendly. There are related but different problems installing ruby-debug on windows for both RadRails and altered_beast.

I've just installed Aptana RadRails, build: 2.0.2.1257900714. This immediately comes up with the error

>gem install -l ruby-debug-ide-0.4.5.gem
ERROR: Error installing ruby-debug-ide-0.4.5.gem:
ruby-debug-ide requires ruby-debug-base (~> 0.10.3.0, runtime)

RadRails is insisting on a specific version of ruby-debug-base.  On Linux, OS X etc you could install this version run the following command from a command line (possibly the one in RadRails). Unfortunately that doesn't work on Windows:

>gem install ruby-debug-base 0.10.3.0
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
ERROR: Error installing ruby-debug-base:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

C:/InstantRails-2.0/ruby/bin/ruby.exe extconf.rb
creating Makefile

nmake
'nmake' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

To work around this:

1. Close RadRails.

2.Download ruby-debug-base gem from Ruby Forge: ruby-debug-base-0.10.3-mswin32.gem e.g. to C:\temporary. In my case the ".gem" extension was changed to ".tar" in the download. I don't know why. Apparently some operating systems do this. If that happens to you then rename it back to ".gem".

3. Then from a command line: 

cd /d C:\temporary
gem install ruby-debug-base -l
gem install ruby-debug

4. Then restart RadRails and it will automatically install the ruby-debug-ide 0.4.5.