MySQL driver for Rails in Windows 7 x64

Question

I've got problem with connecting to MySQL database on my freshly installed Windows 7 machine. I'm getting this error when I try to migrate my database.

!!! The bundled mysql.rb driver has been removed from Rails 2.2. Please install 
the mysql gem and try again: gem install mysql.
rake aborted!
193: %1 is not valid Win32 application - C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.8.1-x86-mswin32/lib/1.8/mysql_api.so

I currently have installed

ruby 1.8.6 (2008-08-11 patchlevel 287) [i386-mswin32]
mysql version 5.0.86  for Win64
gem 1.3.1
mysql-2.8.1-x86-mswin32

Answer 1

My colleague had a similar problem while running rails on Windows 7. He had to replace the libmySQL.dll (in the PATH) with the one from InstantRails.

Answer 2

I spent hours trying to get MySQL and Rails to play nicely on Windows (albeit XP, both 32 and 64-bit versions). I finally gave up since my production box was running Linux (on which Rails and MySQL play very nicely) and just used SQLite 3 for development. No headaches to get it working and it runs fast enough for development purposes.

However, I did hear of some people that had luck replacing one of the DLLs provided by the gem with one provided by the official MySQL distribution. Also, some people simply didn't have this DLL at all which was causing problems. In the end, it didn't work for me, but hopefully you will have more luck.