A Mac-esque Rails Development Environment on Windows
Here's the deal, as I've said before, I like Windows and I love Vista. Mac's certainly are beautiful; but as of yet "It just works" is not convincing enough for me. However, any Railer will tell you that the holy grail of Rails editors is TextMate, which of course is Mac only. I've come to believe that TextMate is not just the favorite Rails editor because a titanium Mac Book looks good with DHH's blazer, but there is also a common philosophy between them. A simple elegant language should have a simple and elegant editor. So therein lies my delima.
Throughout the creation of my website builder, doodlekit, many different editors/environments have come and gone. I've been eyeing e (three times fast), and it's really shaping up to be a very nice TextMate clone for Windows. Even before that I fell in love with Console, which makes the Windows command line pleasurable. And cygwin is of course more than capable of running a Rails environment. All the pieces have fallen into place, and I have a recipe for a very nice Rails development environment on Windows.
Notes: I did this on Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit, but I think it should be the same for all Windows versions. This guide assumes you have a novice understanding of Linux/cygwin. And finally, I’ll leave choosing and installing a database to you.
Step 1 - Install e
http://www.e-texteditor.com/download/e_beta_setup.exe
Be sure to pay for it once you've decided to keep using it.
Step 2 - Install cygwin
E relies on cygwin for some of the bundles, which is ok since our Rails environment will also be running in cygwin. Start e after it's installed. If a dialog titled "Update Cygwin" doesn't popup right away, click on some of the bundles till it does.
Select the "Manual" radio button and click "Next".
The default options should be good until you get to "Select Packages". Make sure Ruby, Subversion, and any other Packages you might need are selected to install.
Finish the cygwin installation
Step 3 - Install Console
Console is probably my favorite thing ever. It's a command prompt replacement for Windows with tabs, transparency and other funky jazz.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/
Make sure you grab the very latest build.
You'll want to setup cygwin as a Console Tab. Just go into the settings and click "Add" under "Tabs". Use the following as the "Shell".
c:\cygwin\bin\bash --login -i
If you want it to automatically open cygwin when you start Console, just move it to the top of the Tabs list.
Step 4 - Install Ruby Gems
http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=126&release_id=9501
Download, un-tar, and run the setup ruby script. You'll probably get an error that says "No such file to load -- ubygems (LoadError)". Just run the following command to get around it.
unset RUBYOPT
Step 5 - Install Gems
Now just install rails and all the other gems you need, as you normally would. Keep in mind that you are in cygwin, so do NOT choose the win32 versions of the gems
gem install rails --include-dependencies
Step 6 - Setup e Alias
This last step is optional. If you're familiar with TextMate, you can open it from the command line use the 'mate' command, but more importantly you can open the current directory as a project by using 'mate .'. e does the same thing, however when you do this in cygwin, it retains control of the shell instead of running it in the background. I came up with a way to handle this, but Charles Roper in the e forums had a better way.
First make sure e is in your $PATH, either through the Windows or cygwin environment variables. You can test this by just typing 'e' from cygwin and hiting enter. To make e run in the background add this to your .bashrc file.
alias e='cygstart e'
Step 7 – Test it Out
Open Console, and make sure you’re on a cygwin tab. Create a rails project as normal.
rails burrito
Go into the new directory and open e.
cd burrito
e .
This will open e with your new project loaded into the project explorer.
That’s it! Have fun.
Comments
| 4. | Charles Roper - 03 27, 2007 @ 08:13AM |
Great write-up. Terminator (http://software.jessies.org/terminator/) is another great replacement for the native Windows console, which offers more features than most other console/terminal apps on any platform. However, it is Java based and thus not a quick as Console2, and also not quite as reliable (the "less" utility, for example, doesn't work properly for me).
| 5. | andhapp - 03 27, 2007 @ 08:28AM |
This is a coincidence but I have exactly the same setup for my rails.... cool I know it works like a charm. I started using console because I could use tabs in it and instead of having two different SSH consoles open I started using Console...good stuff
| 6. | andhapp - 03 27, 2007 @ 08:35AM |
I have been raving about this e-text editor on my blog as well...it is truly awesome
http://www.andhapp.com/blog/Future_is_bright_Future_is_ETextEditor/33
| 9. | Adam McCrea - 03 27, 2007 @ 11:13AM |
This is fantastic. I've been really enjoying E for the last couple of weeks, but I hadn't yet integrated into my Rails dev environment. Thanks for this timely post!
| 10. | Mikkel - 03 27, 2007 @ 02:37PM |
Also, If your on XP - check out http://osx.portraitofakite.com/
Very cool mac-wannabee software for windows.
| 12. | Ben Kittrell - 03 27, 2007 @ 03:39PM |
I think I had to "Run as Administrator" the first time.
I'm sure someone else had the same problem in the Console forums.
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=143117
| 13. | johnpg - 03 27, 2007 @ 03:42PM |
I do the same sorts of things at work for Rails development, but at home use a Mac. It's funny, but if there were ever a reason to switch to a Mac it would be having to go out of your way like this just to make Windows more Mac-like. Take it from someone who uses both, you'll be glad you switched. :-)
| 14. | Roman Heinrich - 03 27, 2007 @ 05:09PM |
Hey, very nice trick with RubyGems, this "No such file to load -- ubygems (LoadError)" was killing me! Now, could you perhaps find a registry-entry to shell from the explorer-window into the current folder with Console, had found this somewhere on the net for cygwin:
REGEDIT4
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\BashHere]
@="&Bash This"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\BashHere\command]
@="c:\\cygwin\\bin\\bash.exe --login -c \"cd '%1' ; exec /bin/bash -rcfile ~/.bashrc\""
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell\BashHere]
@="&Bash This"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell\BashHere\command]
@="c:\\cygwin\\bin\\bash.exe --login -c \"cd '%1' ; exec /bin/bash -rcfile ~/.bashrc\""
and this for the original Commandline:
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\CommandRun]
@=""
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\CommandRun\Command]
@="C:\\Windows\\System32\\Cmd.exe /k c:\cmdtoolkit.bat cd \"%1\""
But i'm struggling with the Console to get that functionallity.
Thanks!
| 15. | phreaki - 03 27, 2007 @ 10:05PM |
I had to unset RUBYOPT before rails would install, but hey... it works and I'm happy.
Thanks for the info, it made my day.
| 16. | Jeff Coleman - 03 27, 2007 @ 11:21PM |
When you say:
> You'll want to setup cygwin as a Console Tab.
> Just go into the settings and click "Add" under "Tabs".
> Use the following as the "Shell".
...what does this mean? Go into the settings of which program and click "Add" under "Tabs"? I'm not seeing this option in E, in Console or in Cygwin.
| 17. | Jeff Coleman - 03 27, 2007 @ 11:23PM |
...nevermind. I had downloaded Console 1 instead of 2.
| 18. | Marcus Bristav - 03 28, 2007 @ 12:49AM |
I have a problem with irb on windows consoles (including cygwin and console2). The symptom is that when I write long lines (not *very* long, just long), executes it, and then use arrow up to repeat the line and starts to go back on the line it (the line) usually gets totally screwed up. The screw up is only "graphical" in that it's totally unreadable but I can still edit (although you don't know what you edit...) and execute.
Anyone knows what this is about?
| 19. | Eric Jardas - 03 28, 2007 @ 03:03AM |
I think there is a editor better then e and that is intype. Its textmate inspired, still beta but in this early stages the best editor i have seen.http://intype.info/forums/discussion/349/intype-alpha-021328-updated/#Item_0
+ project manager addon to have a project sidebar and tabs http://intype.info/forums/discussion/256/intype-project-manager-alpha/#Item_0
| 20. | Dave - 03 28, 2007 @ 03:11AM |
jEdit.
Free. Cross-platform.
You can make it look like textmate. It's got projects, code-completion, consoles. It's got SFTP, bash scripting, grep-like functions. Diff, super abbreviations, macros, code explorers, templates.
Even got Sudoko.
I heart jEdit.
| 21. | dn - 03 28, 2007 @ 04:40AM |
Thing is this is a massive effort compared to just getting Textmate and Locomotive. All the terminal niceness is built in with OS X and works perfect e just ends up feeling very glitchy because of the limitations of windows.
Also the syntax highlighting only does transparency in Textmate, which is absolutely wonderful from a usability standpoint, it really lets you see how syntax blocks are interacting with each other
| 22. | Chris B - 03 28, 2007 @ 04:45AM |
Great write up Ben!
I've been using this setup for about 6 weeks now since discovering e and can attest to its power to improve productivity! Amazing when you can emulate the workflow of the core team, everything just falls into place better!
ADDITIONAL TIP: If you're using SQLite databases you can install SQLiteBrowser (http://sqlitebrowser.sourceforge.net/) and setup windows to open .sqlite2 and .sqlite3 database using it - then when editing in e you can double click the entry in the db/ folder and it will open your database for direct editing - real time saver and knits database and code together in the same environment!
Note: you need different version of SQLite Browser for the different versions of .sqlite2 and .sqlite3
FURTHER TIP: Make sure you have the latest version of e installed and then if you have TortoiseSVN (http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/) installed the project pane will show you the version control/svn status of each file! Makes the whole thing into the ultimate Rails IDE
| 24. | Chris B - 03 28, 2007 @ 05:51AM |
@Matti - Yeah, I have the same problem, I also compiled Ruby from source within cygwin hoping for a speed improvement but any there was was negligible. I now tend to use a combination of the two, I put up with the speed of cygwin for generating controllers, models etc because I'm not doing that all the time and it encourages me to not speed-type and make a spelling mistake (which I've been know to do). But I use a native windows installation of Ruby and mongrel to run the development server, since waiting for cygwin's ruby to run mongrel will make you wanna kill yourself.
| 26. | Jack Sleight - 03 28, 2007 @ 09:07AM |
You should also take a look at Intype. Although its no where near as feature complete yet (its still in Alpha stages), it is going in a similar direction to e: http://intype.info/
| 27. | Matti - 03 28, 2007 @ 09:13AM |
@Cris B - I've switched to running a regular Instant Rails w/ command promt config, but it is still very slow. I'm not sure the normal execution time should be. On my pentium 1.8 ghz laptop it takes ~10 secs to run a simple unit test that creates and saves a single model object. I tried running the same unit test with the profiler turned on and it takes about 30 secs to execute. Are these execution times normal?
| 29. | Chris B - 03 28, 2007 @ 09:33AM |
My laptop died recently and I'm back on an old 1.3 Athlon while I wait for the 2nd Gen Macbook Pro's so I feel your pain! yeah that sort of time sounds right - maybe a bit long for a 1.8G but that could well be the Instant Rails, I've only tried that once and found it so bad I swore never to touch it again. I would recommend getting the native windows ruby installer then just install gems, then rails, mongrel and sqlite - the native windows ruby running stuff through cmd.exe is definitely the fastest execution speed on windows platform.
If you're stuck on a slow development machine for whatever reason use the situation to your benefit - it takes long to run tests? spend the time thinking what you're going to do next, work-out ways to improve the speed of methods, controller actions etc - think of it as a gift of time rather than a delay in getting your test results - "see positive in negative, good philosophy" 8oD
| 31. | slabounty - 03 28, 2007 @ 02:23PM |
When I try to create a tab with cygwin bash using the above things work. However when I try to run say "ls" I get:
154993645 [unknown (0xC88) ] bash 3332 fork_copy: linked dll data/bss pass 0 failed, 0x6BD000..0x6Bd020, done 0, windows pid 3400, Win32 error 87
Hopefully, I typed the above correctly as I couldn't see how to highlight something to copy/paste it. Doing an "ls" in the Console2 tab, everything does seem to work
| 34. | Geoff - 03 29, 2007 @ 04:45PM |
It's funny to see people saying: "You should see the new editor, InType, it's catching up fast!"
History lesson: InType started on the TextMate for Windows quest *before* e, yet e has zoomed ahead and is way more feature complete than InType, despite InType's head start.
It's fine if you want to stick with InType, but realize that both editors are quite new, yet e has managed to improve a lot more in the same period of time.
| 37. | Nick - 03 30, 2007 @ 09:17AM |
JEdit has actually got all the capabilities of both e and InType (as far as I can see), with the exception of compatibility with Textmate bundles. It also has the advantage of having been around for a lot longer, which means it has a large amount of existing plugins and great macro capabilities.
Its main problem is that it doesn't look anywhere near as good as Textmate (or e or InType)...
| 38. | Nick - 03 30, 2007 @ 09:20AM |
Oh, and then there's Ruby support in Netbeans, which I have yet to try but which is apparently superior to RadRails: http://tnlessone.wordpress.com/2007/02/28/ruby-rails-ide-comparison-idea-netbeans-radrails/
That's a full-blown IDE rather than a text editor though.
| 40. | Arik - 03 30, 2007 @ 11:34PM |
There is no logical reason to spend 1800+ on mac just so you can have a "cool' rails environment. Give me a break!
And also, intype is by far the worst editor I have ever used. It gives a text editor and some bundles, whoop-de-doo.
| 41. | regeya - 03 31, 2007 @ 11:46AM |
jEdit has a number of plugins which will give you TextMate-like functionality. jEdit is extensible and free, which makes it a bit like Emacs; however, unlike Emacs, it doesn't require you to learn a dialect of Lisp just to configure the thing. Think Emacs for the 21st century. ;-)
| 42. | SilverTab - 04 01, 2007 @ 12:15AM |
I wan an intype fan too..the first couple of versions of e that I tried weren't that great and aside from the undo history panel it didn't had much to offer.... Well I tried e again maybe a month ago and I was suprised to find a working project manager, compatiblity with textmate bundles and lots of features that made it quite a decent editor, and I gotta admit I was pretty much amazed by it... I do love the speed and simplicity of InType, and I am definitely keeping an eye on the project... but at the point where both editors are right now, e is the one I am using for all my editing needs as it features pretty much everything I need and expect from a text editor while intype is still in early alpha stages and definitly lacks important features that I expect from a text editor. I know it might change in the future , and I don't care if I eventually have to buy both... but for now I'll simply go with the one that is fulfilling most of my needs and in the meantime, that happens to be e....
And to anyone saying "Intype is free while e isn't"... please double check your info...both are offering free alpha/beta versions...that you can download and use without any limits/trial period or anything....e is free as long as it's in beta stages...and same goes for intype...but you will have to pay for both of them eventually....
| 43. | Neville Franks - 04 10, 2007 @ 02:52PM |
I've recently finished a significant upgrade to our IDE, ED for Windows to include Ruby language support. I've written a Blog post at: http://blog.surfulater.com/2007/02/21/write-ruby-code-faster-with-ed-for-windows/ which will give you a good overview of ED's capabilities with a specific focus on Ruby.
ED4W is a full featured Programmer's Editor/IDE with support for 30+ languages. It includes all of the editing capabilities you would expect plus a built-in Source Database Engine that tracks every class, method, module, struct etc. in real time enabling you to instantly jump to any function etc. and making navigation of large complex code bases much easier.
I'm particularly interested in feedback on the new Ruby capabilities in this release. I tested various Ruby editors and was surprised at how poor a job they'd done with even basic things like syntax highlighting.
The ED Web site is at http://www.getsoft.com I suggest you start with the Blog post though.
Neville Franks, Author of ED for Windows and Surfulater.
| 46. | nedric - 04 21, 2007 @ 12:54PM |
Don't forget <a href="http://web.gccaz.edu/~medgar/puttycyg/">PuTTycyg</a>! I use this as a cmd replacement and love it.
Also, I recommend not using the cygwin ruby distribution. I install both the one-click and the cygwin package and then rename all the cygwin binaries with a "c" prefix so I can still use them when I want, but the default is to use c:\ruby. Using irb and ri from dos is a pain and the cygwin versions work just as well there.
| 47. | Cameron Singe - 04 25, 2007 @ 08:57PM |
Hey Great,
Thanks worked well for me,
I'am running Vista Bussiness
I had to chmod 0755 to /user/bin to allow writing permissions to the folder to install the rails gem
Thanks mate
| 49. | SEOG - 05 15, 2007 @ 12:25PM |
Appreciate the writeup, I know many other rails folks have been tempted to drop a few grand on a macbook pro just have to have textmate. Good to see other options being detailed!
| 50. | coyote - 06 04, 2007 @ 09:48AM |
ditto Comment 48, re: /tmp/mysql.sock (and that solution worked fine for our PC users)
| 51. | Walker - 06 04, 2007 @ 05:05PM |
Learned of console2 and e from this blog. Thanks. Love the history feature in e. I put my vote in for these for best tools to develop for ruby on rails in windows.
I am having the same problem with console2 (build 131) as Marcus Bristav (comment 18). When I type a line in console2 (same thing happens when I just use cmd.exe) that is long (15+ characters), and then I try to backspace or navigate to the middle of the line, the cursor will appear jump up to the previous line and I can no longer tell where it's actually at in the line. It's as if cmd.exe cannot handle editing lines that are more than 15-20 characters long. Does anyone know of a fix? Thanks!
| 52. | Ken Liu - 07 25, 2007 @ 08:23PM |
@Walker
I've encountered the bug you described - it's a problem with cmd.exe. It makes working with irb a pain on Windows. Console is just a wrapper for command-line programs, so if the cmd.exe has the bug, Console will show the same thing. I don't know of a fix or a workaround.
| 53. | Ken Liu - 07 25, 2007 @ 08:27PM |
@Ben
I should mention that gvim/vim for Windows is a great addition/alternative to your described setup. It's fast and powerful, and supports both a console and GUI mode.
I've switched from JEdit to gvim for the past few months in order to beef up my vim chops. You never know when you'll find yourself at a unix command line with no other editors in sight.
| 55. | Dave - 08 16, 2007 @ 04:59PM |
If you want the "Unixy goodness" without Cygwin, install <a href="http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/">Un*xUtils</a> from SourceForge. Just unzip, put the bin folder in your path (I have separate environment variables for my apps, e.g. MYSQL_BIN, RUBY_BIN, UNX_UTILS_BIN, etc then just combine them to make my path) and then you get access to tons of Un*x utilities like ls, agrep/egrep/fgrep/grep, cat, more/less, gzip/gunzip, tar, md5sum, cp, rm, mv, diff/patch, etc ad nauseum. Directly in Windows, no shell required.
But if you like, you also get the Bourne shell for free.
Also has pclip and gclip (put/get windows clipboard from/to the shell) and gplay (play media files).
And since Un*xUtils ln command will only make hard links, download <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/FileAndDisk/Junction.mspx">Microsoft's junction.exe command</a> (formerly of SysInternals) to make "junctions", symlinks under NTFS:
c:\> junction mydocs "c:\documents and settings\me\my documents"
c:\> cd mydocs
c:\mydocs> ls
-- lists everything under "my documents"
Works great for me. :)
| 56. | Mark Percival - 09 27, 2007 @ 08:05AM |
I've got a solution that beats both Cygwin and a Mac for a rails development platform. Ubuntu.
Run it inside of VMWare(which is free), on top of windows or osx. I give my Ubuntu VM 128 megs of RAM, run it on a 800mhz laptop with XP, and develop in e. In order to access the VM just setup samba sharing and mount the drives on your windows side. It rarely touches above 2% CPU when idle, and I've never seen a noticeable difference in my laptops performance.
I've tried Cygwin, but with Ubuntu virtualized I can PERFECTLY match my production server while staying completely on Windows. Deployments a cinch, and the command line can't be beat :)
| 58. | Val - 10 30, 2007 @ 01:57PM |
Well, just another needless reinvention of the wheel, this time another of the still 10.000 available editors for Windows, which tries to ride on the wave of Mac Textmate users.
I always wonder why people are still going to develop again and again new editors-copies. We already have Emacs/Xemacs, Vim, UltraEdit, PSpad, Jedit, Slickedit, Multiedit, ED, CodeWright ...and so on... where most of these are highly customizable too and would offer all that stuff right out of the box now and yet. Not to mention full blown IDEs like Netbeans, Eclipse etc. which also support mostly all prog languagues.
So why do you guys need these new freshman editors like "e" and "Intype" at all? IMHO these are just produced to get out a few bucks out of Mac Textmate users, who may will from time to time work on a Windows system.
Sorry, but I don't see here any real reason for another 10.001 editor.
| 59. | Carlos Aquino - 11 29, 2007 @ 04:31AM |
They showed us the screencasts... that´s why "e" and "Intype"
The editor is available to download... we downloaded it, installed and used...
Just for that.
| 60. | George - 12 22, 2007 @ 05:46AM |
Heh, nice tutorial, thanks!
| 62. | Horia - 02 19, 2008 @ 09:54AM |
Max, comment 54: In database.yml I just changed host from localhost to 127.0.0.1, restarted the server and worked.
| 63. | Dr. Alexander - 03 05, 2008 @ 06:42AM |
pff... thanks for website builder, but i think thath newbies must teach html code, tags with notepad :)