In my previous screencast, I showed you how you can get up and running quickly with Ruby on Windows.

In this screencast, I show you how I think you can get up and running correctly with Ruby on Windows.

With Ruby development, it’s generally assumed that the developer is on some kindof a unix-style environment. This generally means developing on:

• Apple OS X
• Linux
• Windows Cygwin

Windows has some seriously shortcomings as a development platform. The cmd.exe shell is not nearly as powerful as the shells that are typically used by unix-y systems, eg. BASH. Also, Windows doesn’t come out-of-the-box with the tools needed for compiling code nor does it come with a package manager or something to make it easy to install these tools and their dependencies.

Enter Cygwin

Cygwin provides a Linux-like environment for Windows. It can give you all of the commands that developers generally assume you have like:

• ssh
• make
• gcc
• rsync
• git
• and much, much, much more

In this screencast, I show you …

• how to download & install Cygwin and install some packages, eg. Ruby and Git
• how to download & install RubyGems and install some gems, eg. Sinatra and Rails
• how to generate an ssh key, associate it with a GitHub account, clone a GitHub project, & update it
• BONUS: how to update Cygwin to use the Rxvt terminal (instead of Cygwin running in cmd.exe)

NOTE: In the screencast, I clone a git repository from GitHub before showing you how to associate your git with your github account … keep watching. I realize this mistake later in the screencast and show you how to do that.