A Better Way to Set Up Rails on Windows

I've learned this the hard way. Your production environment is probably going to be Linux, so you will need to know that setup & have deployment tools regardless. Setting up Windows (or even OS X in certain respects) is just an additional hassle which will never quite match production.

Seems I have cause to post this in quite a few threads these days:

> These days, it seems like POSIX has become just another VM environment, like Smalltalk, Erlang, the JVM or the CLR. Mingw/Cygwin doesn't run *nix programs "on" Windows, really; it just provides them with a really half-assed VM implementation. Why not instead just go all the way and run, say, Ubuntu Server in a headless VMware appliance? If nothing else, it gives your spare cores something to do :)

It'll get you Rails installed on your computer, but it doesn't resolve the limitation mentioned in the SO article.

The Ruby community is just too coupled to Unix, any setup you have directly on Windows will incomplete.

JRuby is the best option if you don't want to use virtualization, but the JVM startup time really starts to hit you if you use the rails command or rake tasks a lot.

One major reason not to install Rails directly onto Windows is because of all the gem incompatibilities you'll run into. JRuby would have the same problem.

The problem is even worse when you're learning Rails because you'll see an awesome Railscast on how to use X and then find out that you can't use X with JRuby. That'd be terribly frustrating for a beginner.