OK. So against all advice I’m going to be working on a Windows XP setup. There are several good reasons for this, that I won’t bore you with, and many bad reasons, which although outnumber the good ones, would cause me massive organizational problems.
For this I’ve downloaded InstantRails. I’ve done a lot of enterprise software installations in my time, and quite frankly, had my fill of tweaking massive and annoying Apache configurations. When I first came across WAMP, some years ago, I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. It couldn’t have been easier. I expected a similar experience with InstantRails. Sadly, this really wasn’t the case.
Firstly, it’s old, so get ready for some upgrading once it’s installed. Secondly, there are a couple of things that just didn’t fly. Possibly, because I’d already installed Ruby on this box and the environment variables were tripping over each other (this was definitely one of the culprits).
The MySQL part of the image was surprisingly messed up.
- The libmysql.dll file was missing in the ruby/bin directory. I needed to copy that from the mysql/bin directory.
- I was getting “Error #2003 The server is not responding“, which turned out to be a Windows specific problem associated with ODBC. The fix is to:
- Log in to mySQL as root. Open a Command Window, cd to the app directory (probably ‘depot’ in your case), and enter: mysql -u root -p Then just hit enter when prompted for the root password, or enter one if you’ve set one up for the root user.
- Enter the following line to grant access to the “ODBC” user grant all on depot_development.* to ‘ODBC’@’localhost‘;
- Exit
There were several other headaches, which amidst the shouting, cursing and thumping of desk and floor, I failed to document.
The only other thing I need to do each time I start InstantRails is manually run mysqld.exe from the mysql/bin directory. Possibly because it’s conflicting with an ancient MySQL installation on this box, who knows.
After all of this, which ended up taking a couple of days, I ended up with a functioning setup. Now to decide on my first app.