How to install Ruby 1.8.7 on windows

written by Dennis on February 5th, 2010 @ 11:45 AM

It happens that Ruby 1.8.7 is recommended for the current Rails version but there is no one-click installer available for windows the time being. Not a problem, just follow the few steps below:

Download the Ruby 1.8.7 binaries
Extract them to whatever folder you like (e.g c:\ruby)
Add the folder c:\ruby\bin (or whatever folder you extracted Ruby to) to windows PATH variable (how to?)
There are some DLL files missing in the Ruby folder. The easiest is to download the latest InstantRails version, extract it and copy all DLL files from the InstantRails folder ruby/bin to your Ruby bin folder
Rename the DLL ‘zlib1.dll’ to ‘zlib.dll’

That’s it, you’re done :)

To also install and run Rails, simply download rubygems and run ruby setup.rb from the command line inside the folder you extracted rubygems to.

Then Install rails with gem install rails

Hope this was helpful. If you’ve got any question just drop a comment or contact me.