When installing the Ruby on Rails framework, I actually found the instructions provided on the Rails site to be a little confusing. To me, it seemed like if I wanted to run the WEBrick web server instead of Apache, that I’d have to find and install the WEBrick webserver myself. But this isn’t the case.

If you are planning on developing on your own computer but are deploying your web application to a host such as TextDrive, then you don’t need to separately download any webserver. What I found out after I had installed Ruby and the Ruby on Rails framework is that the WEBrick webserver had been bundled with Rails and was automatically installed for me. Awesome.

Anyway, if you are looking at installing Rails on Windows, all you need are two files: the Ruby for Windows installation file and the Ruby gems zip file. After you have downloaded both files, you can follow Rails for Windows, lesson 1 to get those both installed and running. You may also want to look at the other lessons if you need to install MySQL or the other tools, but I haven’t (yet) since I already had MySQL installed locally.

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3. Deploying Ruby on Rails App to TextDrive
4. Ruby on Rails Product Generator Gem
5. Nightly Maintenance for Ruby on Rails Apps