Ruby 2.0 development environment for Windows

We are glad to announce a new release of BitNami Ruby 2.0 Stack, which is focused on improved Windows support.  

BitNami Ruby Stack provides a complete, self-contained development environment for Ruby on Rails for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. We offer one-click packages for each Ruby 1.8, Ruby 1.9 and Ruby 2.0.

BitNami Ruby 2.0 for Windows

With the latest version of Ruby in this package you can find the latest version of Rails. In order to avoid frustration when installing gems that require compilation,  we also include pre-compiled version of the most common gems like thin, eventmachine, mysql2, sqlite3 and rmagick. This is specially interesting on Windows when you don't always have a compilation environment set up. In any case, we also include DevKit on Windows in case you want to use other gems that need to be compiled.

Together with the minimum Ruby on Rails environment we include other components that you will likely use when developing a RoR application. On our Windows version you can find:

• Apache HTTP Server and thin and eventmachine pre-compiled gems for web deployment. 
• Databases: Sqlite3 and MySQL databases together with sqlite3 and mysql2 pre-compiled gems. 
• phpMyAdmin for MySQL administration.
• A graphical manager tool for managing the servers.
• ImageMagick and rmagick gem for image conversion.
• Source version control systems: Subversion and Git

In Linux version you also find NGINX web server and Varnish a web application accelerator. Apache is working with Pushion Passenger by default in this flavor.

You can take a look at our documentation to learn more about how to use BitNami Ruby Stack.

New RubyStack for Ruby On Rails Developers

We are happy to announce a new version of BitNami RubyStack. If you are not familiar with RubyStack, it is a self-contained, easy to use distribution with one goal in mind: to make it simple to get started developing Ruby On Rails applications. BitNami RubyStack is available in the form of free, ready-to-run installers, virtual machine images (VMs) and Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for the Amazon Cloud.

The following versions of BitNami RubyStack are now available on the RubyStack download page:

• 1.8.7-0:  It ships Ruby 1.8.7 and Rails 2.3.14
• 1.9.3-0:  with Ruby 1.9.3 and Rails 3.2.8

These Stacks also include RVM, so it is possible to install any Ruby version on top of any of the Stacks. Check our RVM quick guide to know how to install more Ruby versions. In addition to the Ruby runtime and its dependencies, BitNami RubyStack ships the components listed below:

- Apache 2.2.22 with Passenger module

- NGinx 1.3.4 with Passenger module

- MySQL 5.5.21

- Git 1.7.11.3

- Subversion 1.7.5

- Sphinx 2.0.4

- SQLite 3.7.10

- Memcached 1.4.13

- Varnish 3.0.1

- DevKit for Windows

- PHP and phpMyAdmin (optional)

To simplify the process even more, RubyStack also installs and configures most popular Ruby gems:

- Bundler

- MySQL

- SQLite

- Nokogiri

- Passenger

- RMagick

- Mongrel and Thin

- and more.

One of the improvements in this version of RubyStack is that the dependencies for gems that require compilation are already bundled and pre-configured so they will run out of the box. If you need a different version of one of the gems, you can run the "bundle install" command and it will be automatically download, compile and install the gem in your RubyStack.

In addition, we have also been working on improving our documentation. There is a new Quick Start Guide that addresses the most common questions that we get about BitNami RubyStack. You will also find a step-by-step guide on how to create your first Ruby On Rails project on top of RubyStack. For more advanced users, you can will also find information on how to deploy your application with Passenger in production environments.

Welcome page

In addition to BitNami Stacks, we provide simplified deployment and management of Ruby on Rails development environments in the cloud with BitNami Cloud Hosting. Sign up for our free developer plan to check it out!

RubyStack now with RVM and DevKit support

We are happy to announce that we added support for RVM in BitNami RubyStack for OS X and Linux. RubyStack is a popular all-in-one package for everything that you need to get started with Ruby development in general and Rails in particular. It includes Apache, MySQL, SQLite, ImageMagick, Passenger, etc. RubyStack is free and can be downloaded as native installers, VMWare images or launched as Amazon Machine Images.

This new release of RubyStack includes RVM, a command-line tool which allows you to easily install, manage, and work with multiple Ruby environments from interpreters to sets of gems. This is convenient if you need to maintain multiple projects, dependent on different Ruby versions.

To install different Ruby versions it is necessary to have already installed the main compilation tools. These tools are already included inside our RubyStack Virtual Machines and Amazon Cloud Images. If you are using the native installer, you can check the RVM requirements running the following command:

$ rvm requirements

You can list the installed Ruby versions and use one of them. RubyStack 3.2.3-0 installs and configures Ruby 1.9.3-p194.

$ rvm use system

$ ruby --version

ruby 1.9.3p194 (2012-04-20 revision 35410) [x86_64-linux]

You can install another Ruby version, for example:

$ rvm install ruby-1.8.7-p358

You can find more info at BitNami RVM wiki and at the official RVM site.

For Windows users, RubyStack now ships DevKit. It is a toolkit that makes it easy to build and use native C/C++ extensions for Ruby on Windows like JSON, Thin and others.