Foreman start fails on Windows following Heroku tutorial

Question

I'm following the heroku tutorial for Heroku/Facebook integration (but I suspect this issue has nothing to do with facebook integration) and I got stuck on the stage where I was supposed to start foreman (I've installed the Heroku installbelt for windows, which includes foreman):

> foreman start

gives:

C:/RailsInstaller/Ruby1.8.7/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/dependency.rb:247:in `to_specs': Could not find foreman (>= 0) amongst [POpen4-0.1.4, Platform-0.4.0, ZenTest-4.6.2, abstract-1.0.0, actionm
ailer-3.0.11, actionmailer-3.0.9, actionpack-3.0.11, actionpack-3.0.9, activemodel-3.0.11, activemodel-3.0.9, activerecord-3.0.11, activerecord-3.0.9, activerecord-sqlserver-adapter-3.0.15, activereso
urce-3.0.11, activeresource-3.0.9, activesupport-3.0.11, activesupport-3.0.9, addressable-2.2.6, annotate-2.4.0, arel-2.0.10, autotest-4.4.6, autotest-growl-0.2.16, autotest-rails-pure-4.1.2, autotest
-standalone-4.5.8, builder-2.1.2, bundler-1.0.15, diff-lcs-1.1.3, erubis-2.6.6, factory_girl-1.3.3, factory_girl_rails-1.0, faker-0.3.1, gravatar_image_tag-1.0.0.pre2, heroku-2.14.0, i18n-0.5.0, json-
1.6.1, launchy-2.0.5, mail-2.2.19, mime-types-1.17.2, mime-types-1.16, nokogiri-1.5.0-x86-mingw32, open4-1.1.0, pg-0.11.0-x86-mingw32, polyglot-0.3.3, polyglot-0.3.1, rack-1.2.4, rack-1.2.3, rack-moun
t-0.6.14, rack-test-0.5.7, rails-3.0.11, rails-3.0.9, railties-3.0.11, railties-3.0.9, rake-0.9.2.2, rake-0.8.7, rb-readline-0.4.0, rdoc-3.11, rdoc-3.8, rest-client-1.6.7, rspec-2.6.0, rspec-core-2.6.
4, rspec-expectations-2.6.0, rspec-mocks-2.6.0, rspec-rails-2.6.1, rubygems-update-1.8.11, rubyzip-0.9.4, rubyzip2-2.0.1, spork-0.9.0.rc8-x86-mingw32, sqlite3-1.3.3-x86-mingw32, sqlite3-ruby-1.3.3, te
rm-ansicolor-1.0.7, thor-0.14.6, tiny_tds-0.4.5-x86-mingw32, treetop-1.4.10, treetop-1.4.9, tzinfo-0.3.31, tzinfo-0.3.29, webrat-0.7.1, will_paginate-3.0.pre2, win32-api-1.4.8-x86-mingw32, win32-open3
-0.3.2-x86-mingw32, win32-process-0.6.5, windows-api-0.4.0, windows-pr-1.2.1, zip-2.0.2] (Gem::LoadError)
        from C:/RailsInstaller/Ruby1.8.7/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/dependency.rb:256:in `to_spec'
        from C:/RailsInstaller/Ruby1.8.7/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:1210:in `gem'
        from C:/Program Files (x86)/ruby-1.9.3/bin/foreman:18

Since I'm a complete noob in this I'm not sure if my question here is a duplicate for Error on 'foreman start' while following the Python/Flask Heroku tutorial (because it's not quite the same error). If so, does anyone have a method for deploying a development environment on windows (for Heruko, Python, Facebook app)? Or should I use Ubuntu for this?

Thanks

Answer 1

Although this question doesn't seem to be of interest to anyone here (5 views in ~2 hours, 0 answers, 0 comments...), I have found the solution and ready to share it with anyone that will encounter it:

1. Install the latest ruby from rubyinstaller.org (1.9.3-p194) - Sometimes there is a collision installs of the same version, in my case I've just uninstalled all versions of ruby, but if you already have other application that needs older version then you have to be more careful

2. Check that your system is default to use this version by invoking ruby -v in command line prompt: and getting ruby 1.9.3p194 (2012-04-20) [i386-mingw32] (you may have to close and re-open cmd, to include the new environment variables)

3. Still in cmd, invoke:

   gem install foreman
   gem install taps
   

4. now go to your Procfile app (e.g. your heroku example app from the tutorial) and execute foreman start, you should see something like this:

   18:23:52 web.1  | started with pid 7212
   18:23:54 web.1  |  * Running on http://0.0.0.0:5000/
   18:23:54 web.1  |  * Restarting with reloader 
   

Answer 2

after manually adding the ruby path to my system PATH environment variable (Win 7), it still didn't work.

i had to change the default install path of Heroku from

C:\Program Files(x86)\Heroku to C:\Heroku

as it didn't properly handle the space in the path. I also tried C:\PROGRA~2\Heroku\ruby-1.9.2\bin to no avail. I imagine any space-less path will do.

hth