Rails Installer + Cygwin: How to best use the ruby version of the rails installer inside Cygwin?

Question

I've just installed my Windows setup for working on Ruby on Rails through RailsInstaller. On the Windows command line it all works well. I'm also using cygwin, which install by default its own version of ruby. That doesn't work along well with C-extension gems like bcrypt-ruby. the RailsInstaller version of ruby doesn't have a problem though.

Where I do get an issue is when I try to install unix-specific gems like unicorn on windows. It won't go. This should work on cygwin. So I'm in a conundrum. I've uninstalled the cygwin ruby. But now I can't run the other ruby, rubygems or rake inside cygwin. It spits out the following lovely message:

 C:\RailsInstaller\Ruby1.9.3\bin\ruby.exe: No such file or directory -- 
 /cygdrive/c/RailsInstaller/Ruby1.9.3/bin/bundle (LoadError)

Hope some of you could work around the issue.

Answer 1

Yaakov was close, it is indeed easier to just install everything into cygwin, including the C-extension gems (or most of them). The problem remains though, everytime there is an update on one of those gems. Actually the solution was installing the devel make packages that were missing from my cygwin. After that I finally could compile and proceed.

Answer 2

Cygwin Ports provides Rails for Cygwin's Ruby; choose the ruby-rails package and allow all dependencies to be installed.