How to get Gruff working with Rails on windows

NOTE: You can’t do gem install rmagick on windows since (as of now) rmagick gem is only for *nix systems

1) Download rmagick-win32 from http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=12&release_id=15197

This also has imagemagick for 8 pixels so you don’t need to do a separate download for imagemagick. If you want imagemagick for 16 pixels then download it from here http://www.imagemagick.org/script/binary-releases.php

Imagemagick site says ‘16 bitversion permits you to read or write 16-bit images without losing precision but requires twice as much resources as the Q8 version.’

3) Install Imagemagick

To confirm if imagemagick is installed properly go to your command prompt and type

convert logo: logo.gif
identify logo.gif
imdisplay logo.gif

this should display the imagemagick logo if everything was ok

4) Go to your command prompt and run gem update --system

5) Go the directory where you unzipped the downloaded rmagick-win32 file

6) Run gem install rmagick --local

after it is installed successfully then you should see

Successfully installed rmagick, version 1.15.9

7) Either run gem install gruff

OR

to use rails plugin. Go to your app root directory and run

ruby script/plugin install http://topfunky.net/svn/plugins/gruff

And you are done…

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How to install Ruby on Rails with Sybase anywhere adapter on Windows

Installing Rails on Windows and using Sybase as db for the first time is a pain. So I thought to write a how to:

1) Download latest stable release of Ruby from http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=167 on to your computer.

2) Run the executable and follow the onscreen instructions.

3) Once Ruby is installed successfully then go to command prompt and type ruby -v then hit enter. If everything was done properly then you will see the version of ruby, something like this

ruby 1.8.6 (date ...) [..]

4) Now you need to download the latest gem from http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=126

5) Unzip it and then go to the command prompt again and type ruby setup.rb.

6) This will install the gem package manager. To be sure if everything went OK type gem -v on the command prompt to see the version of gem installed on your machine.

7) Now, to install rails run gem install rails --include-dependencies and wait while it is installed. Once this process is complete then run rails -v and you should get the rails version as the output.

To communicate your rails app with Sybase you need to follow these steps.

1) Download sybaseanywhere_adapter.zip file (by Michael Scott)

2) Inside you have two ruby files and a read me file:

• Put sybaseanywhere_adapter.rb file under your ruby installation, i.e., ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\activerecord-1.13.2\lib\active_record\connection_adapters
• Put sybaseanywhere.rb file file under your ruby installation, i.e., ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\activerecord-1.13.2\lib\active_record\vendor
• Now add sybaseanywhere in ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\activerecord-1.13.2\lib\active_record.rb file like this
  RAILS_CONNECTION_ADAPTERS = %w( mysql postgresql sqlite firebird sqlserver db2 oracle sybase openbase frontbase sybaseanywhere )

3) Now create a directory called ADO, if you don’t already have it under your ruby installation directory, for example, ruby\lib\ruby\site_ruby\1.8\DBD

4) Download rub-dbi package from http://rubyforge.org/projects/ruby-dbi/ unzip it and put the ruby-dbi\lib\dbd\ADO.rb under your newly created directory ruby\lib\ruby\site_ruby\1.8\DBD\ADO

5) Your database.yml will also look a bit different like this

development:
adapter: sybaseanywhere
dsn: dsn_name
mode: DBI:ADO

Obviously, you have to create your dsn name using windows control panel. Now thats something off topic and I imagine you already know how to do this.

On windows you can use Aptana as your IDE (download from here) since it is free and has plugins for rails, svn, etc.

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