Manually Installing Ruby in Windows Vista

Follow these steps to install versions not supported by the one-click installer.

  1. Download the version you want at the official Ruby website.  Make sure to select a Windows binary archive, not a source code archive.
  2. Extract the contents of the archive to the directory of your choice (e.g. c:\ruby).
  3. Add the Ruby binaries to your system path.  In Windows Vista, open the Start Menu, right-click Computer, then select Properties > Advanced System Settings > Environment Variables.  Append ;c:\ruby\bin to the PATH system variable. (If you extracted Ruby to a different location, modify your entry accordingly.)
  4. Click OK to save your settings.
  5. Get http://www.zlib.net/zlib123-dll.zip.  
    Extract zlib1.dll to your Ruby installation’s bin directory, then rename it to zlib.dll.
  6. Get version 1.2.0 of RubyGems (1.3.0 doesn’t work on Windows as of this writing).  Make sure to select one of the source archives, not the update gem.
  7. Extract the contents of the archive to a temporary directory, then run setup.rb.
  8. Go back to the Environment Variables tab in step 3.  Create a new system variable called RUBYOPT and set its value to –rubygems.
  9. Open a command prompt window and run gem install rake.

You should now have a working installation of your desired version of Ruby.

Published in: on October 2, 2008 at 9:11 am  Comments (3)  

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3 CommentsLeave a comment

  1. On November 12, 2008 at 8:04 am Wim said:

    Thanks! Just what I was looking for.

    Reply
  2. On July 6, 2009 at 11:11 pm TheMexican said:

    Thanks, this really helps!!

    Reply
  3. On July 18, 2009 at 8:39 pm SomeGuy said:

    Thanks for this. An addendum though:

    If you’re installing Ruby 1.9.1 on Windows, you might get a “Ruby Unable to Locate Component” dialog. What this means is that the readline.dll library to be installed.

    The solution is to download the binary .zip from
    http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/readline.htm,
    extract the bin/readline5.dll file to the ruby bin folder (it should be C:\ruby\bin). You then rename it to readline.dll, and that should get rid of that annoying error message.

    Reply

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