Ruby on Vista

Question

I installed Ruby and Ruby on Rails yesterday on Vista 32bit using the directions on this site: http://rubyonrails.org/down

So I downloaded the installer, then Gems, then I downloaded rails with Gems.

Now I can't use the Gem or Ruby commands in the command line... so I assume there's something wrong with the environment variables, but I hav eno idea how to set them up in Vista or what to put.

Can anyone help me with this?

Answer 1

To set up the environment variables, do this

1. Fire up the start menu
2. Right-Click on Computer and select Properties
3. Click Advanced system settings in the left-hand bar, and confirm the UAC prompt
4. Select the Advanced tab (it's 3rd)
5. Click Environment Variables... (at the bottom)
6. In the top box (User variables for XXX) either find the entry for PATH, or click new to create the entry.
   If there is already a PATH use semi-colons to seperate each directory listed in it
7. Put c:\ruby\bin (change if you installed ruby somewhere else) in.
8. Click OK a lot of times to close all the windows we opened.
9. Restart your command prompt.

gem and ruby and irb should now all work. Whoever said that GUI tools are slower than command line tools. pshaw!

Answer 2

In the command line window type PATH then hit return, do you see ruby.exe on the PATH environment variable?

If you installed ruby to say c:\ruby then it'll be c:\ruby\bin\.

Looks like it may be missing from the path.

Answer 3

Add your ruby bin directory to your PATH environment variable, go to Control Panel -> System -> Advanced system settings, then go to the Advanced tab, Environment Variables, then edit your PATH variable and append the path to the ruby binaries install i.e. ;C:\ruby\bin