Can't boot WEBrick, the folder for Rails gem is empty

Question

I'm following Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails tutorial, and I got stuck at trying to start rails server on my Windows 7 machine.

I'm trying to do this by following instructions in Chapter 1.2.5., i.e. by typing

rails server

However, instead of booting WEBrick, this returns the instructions for usage of 'rails' command. I've been googling this for a while, and some of the answers seem to have implied that something is wrong with the rails gem.

Now, I've found the rails gem folder ("C:\RailsInstaller\Ruby1.9.3\lib\ruby\gems\1.9.1\gems\rails-3.2.3"), and it's empty!

Also when I try

rails -v

it returns "Rails 3.2.16", although I've removed this version of the gem; if I try

gem list

it kept telling me that the version is 3.2.3.

This persisted until I deleted railties version 3.2.16, which resulted in

rails -v

returning 'Rails 3.2.3', but I still can't boot WEBrick.

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

OK, I've managed to solve my problem.

I've seen a few more people having the same issue, but none of the solutions that I've found helped me, so here's what did it for me, though I'm not 100% sure what exactly was that one thing that actually did it...

I've followed the advice @scarver2 gave in response to my other question, and uninstalled both Rails and Railties gems from my crispy fresh installation of Ruby 1.9.3. (I've installed it using RailsInstaller). Then I've installed Rails 3.2.16 gem by typing

gem install rails -v 3.2.16

and this also installed the corresponding Railties 3.2.16 gem without my intervention.

Then I followed steps from chapters 1.2.3. and 1.2.5. of the tutorial, but making sure that line referencing ruby version in my Gemfile actually corresponds to the version of Ruby that I have installed.

I typed

ruby -v

in the console, to make sure that I have version 1.9.3. indeed. Confirming this, I've edited the Gemfile in my app so it says

ruby '1.9.3'

instead of ruby '2.0.0' line that's used in Listing 1.5. of the tutorial.

After that I've simply went to my app folder, and typed

bundle update
bundle install

in the console, and this time it did not return any errors as it did in my previous attempts. After that, typing

rails server 

did what it should have, and my WEBrick server booted, allowing me to access my app on localhost. Yay!

Now, what I think may have gone wrong the last time was either me screwing up the Gemfile, so the gem versions and their dependencies got messed up. I also assume that ineptly trying to fix this by installing and uninstalling different versions of various gems did not quite help. What may have helped was uninstalling Rails and Railties gems, and installing Rails gem again.

Answer 2

Did you run the installer?

At the time of this writing, I recommend using the Ruby 2.0.0-p353. http://dl.bintray.com/oneclick/rubyinstaller/rubyinstaller-2.0.0-p353.exe?direct Save yourself some future gem headaches and install the DevKit too. http://rubyinstaller.org/downloads/

It should create a folder at C:\Ruby200. Start a new command prompt for the new paths to take affect.

Once Ruby is install, gem install Rails. From your other post, I recommend gem install rails -v 3.2.16

Then execute rails new project_name, then cd project_name. Then run rake db:migrate to create the initial database. At this point, you should be able to run rails server and visit localhost:3000 in your browser.