metaskills / railsinstaller-windows

RailsInstaller for Windows

RailsInstaller

Rails development environment installer for Windows

Overview

The goal of this project is to generate an installer that when run installs all of the most common components for a Rails development environment with no required prerequisites on a Windows system.

How to Contribute

RailsInstaller project code repository is located on GitHub and is bootstrapped, built and packaged via rake tasks.

1. Download and install the latest RailsInstaller

2. Download and install latest Inno Setup Quick Start Pack, ensure iscc.exe is in your PATH

3. Fork the RailsInstaller project on github into your own github account

4. Open the RailsInstaller Command prompt from the start menu RailsInstaller group and change directories to where you like to keep your projects.

5. Clone your fork of the project

   git clone [e-mail]:{{your github user name}}/railsinstaller-windows

   cd railsinstaller-windows

6. Update from origin master branch and checkout a new topic branch for your feature/bugfix.

   git checkout master

   git pull origin master

   git checkout -b mybranchname

7. Bootstrap the project, from the project root run

   rake bootstrap

8. Implement your new feature / fix your bug in the railsinstaller project code. Configuration of the packages are to be included are found in the config/railsinstaller.yml file. Building of the installer into the stage path for packaging happens from the Ruby code in the lib/ directory, starting from the file lib/railsinstaller/actions.rb. Methods called from actions file are implemented in lib/railsinstaller/methods.rb. In order to kick off a build into the stage/ directory run the following rake command.

9. Next build all components on the stage

   rake build

10. We are now ready to package the installer for testing/distribution. Packaging of the installer from the stage path into an executable can be done via the following rake command. This creates the executable (.exe) package file in the pkg/ directory from the files staged during the build process in the stage/ directory.

    rake package

11. Use Inno Setup to package RailsInstaller (NOTE that You can run the package task with --trace for debugging output if the package fails to build or if you simply want to see what is being done as it is done).

    rake package

12. Once you have verified your Push your feature branch up to GitHub

    git commit -a -m "Implemented featureX/bugfixX which ..."

    git push origin mybranchname

13. Now issue a pull request on GitHub

RailsInstaller Components

The next few sections detail the core copmonents that make up RailsInstaller.

Ruby 1.8.7/1.9.2 on Windows

RubyInstaller is a self contained package installer which installs Ruby and RubyGems on a windows system, head over to http://rubyinstaller.org/ for more information.

Development Kit (DevKit)

A MSYS/MinGW based toolkit that enables RailsInstaller to build native C/C++ packages, both for Ruby and gems. DevKit is built and maintained by the wonderful folks over at the RubyInstaller (http://rubyinstaller.org/) project.

Git

The git version that is bundled into RailsInstaller is msysgit

Packaging/Installer

We are using Inno Setup, a free installer for Windows programs.