Rails 4 in Action

Appendix A. Installation guide

Before you can get started building Rails applications, you need to spend some time setting up your development environment. This means installing Ruby, and Rails, on your operating system of choice.

There are various tools you can use to do so, and there’s no “best” or “perfect” solution. This guide covers the installation of our two preferred tools—ruby-install for installing different versions of Ruby from source, and chruby for switching your installed versions of Ruby easily. Then we’ll look at using those tools to install Ruby and Rails, and then spin up a new working Rails app.

Windows

It’s a bit tedious to set up Ruby and Rails on Windows. Windows doesn’t have a package manager built in, and it doesn’t ...