Mike Hall and I have finally gotten together and recorded our first episode of The Iron Languages Podcast.

In this episode, we chat about the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) and IronRuby in particular.

Some links related to topics we discussed:

• Iron Ruby : http://ironruby.net
• Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR):http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Language_Runtime
• Factory Girl: http://github.com/thoughtbot/factory_girl
• Sinatra: http://sinatrarb.com
• Jython: http://www.jython.org
• RailsMentor.org: http://railsmentor.org

Please let us know what you think, how we can improve and what you’d like to hear about. We hope you enjoy the podcast!

On numerous occasions working with C# on .NET, I’ve thought to myself “man, I really wish I had something like Factory Girl here!”. So, last night/this morning, I set out to create a spike solution to determine the feasibility of hosting IronRuby within my C# library, thus allowing me to use Factory Girl to build POCOs for me. The result:

OH YEAH!

Well, at least for the Factory.build method, but that’s all I was interested in for this spike.

I’ve put my code up on github for your perusal. For this particular solution I don’t think you’ll need Visual Studio 2010, but you will certainly need .NET 4 installed, as well as IronRuby. Also note that IronRuby needs to be installed into C:\IronRuby unless you want to edit the app.config and fix up some references.

I’m excited now about the possibilities of utilizing other Ruby libraries in my .NET projects!

A couple of weeks ago, Cory Foy and I had a chat with the Herding Code guys. We talked about the differences between developing on the .NET platform and in Ruby/Rails. It was a great time. Please go give it a listen, and do let me know what you think!

I was interested in IronRuby when it was first announced but had lost hope that it would ever be viable. Will did an awesome job of convincing me that it’s alive and well. Great talk.

– Barry Ezell

Nice! Below are the slides, and here are the (admittedly thin) demos up on Github.

I’m working on getting this contributed to the IronRuby project, as judging from the RubyGems sources, as well as the RubyGems sources distributed with JRuby, this is intended to be distributed by the Ruby implementation, not RubyGems itself.

Also note, this allows one to:

C:\Users\Will>gem up –system

Updating RubyGems
Updating rubygems-update
Successfully installed rubygems-update-1.3.7
Updating RubyGems to 1.3.7
Installing RubyGems 1.3.7
RubyGems 1.3.7 installed

=== 1.3.7 / 2010-05-13

NOTE:

http://rubygems.org is now the default source for downloading gems.

You may have sources set via ~/.gemrc, so you should replace
http://gems.rubyforge.org with http://rubygems.org

http://gems.rubyforge.org will continue to work for the forseeable future.

New features:

* `gem` commands
  * `gem install` and `gem fetch` now report alternate platforms when a
    matching one couldn't be found.
  * `gem contents` --prefix is now the default as specified in --help.  Bug
    #27211 by Mamoru Tasaka.
  * `gem fetch` can fetch of old versions again.  Bug #27960 by Eric Hankins.
  * `gem query` and friends output now lists platforms.  Bug #27856 by Greg
    Hazel.
  * `gem server` now allows specification of multiple gem dirs for
    documentation.  Bug #27573 by Yuki Sonoda.
  * `gem unpack` can unpack gems again.  Bug #27872 by Timothy Jones.
  * `gem unpack` now unpacks remote gems.
  * --user-install is no longer the default.  If you really liked it, see
    Gem::ConfigFile to learn how to set it by default.  (This change was made
    in 1.3.6)

* RubyGems now has platform support for IronRuby.  Patch #27951 by Will Green.

Bug fixes:

* Require rubygems/custom_require if --disable-gem was set.  Bug #27700 by
  Roger Pack.
* RubyGems now protects against exceptions being raised by plugins.
* rubygems/builder now requires user_interaction.  Ruby Bug #1040 by Phillip
  Toland.
* Gem::Dependency support #version_requirements= with a warning.  Fix for old
  Rails versions.  Bug #27868 by Wei Jen Lu.
* Gem::PackageTask depends on the package dir like the other rake package
  tasks so dependencies can be hooked up correctly.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

RubyGems installed the following executables:

C:/Ruby/bin/gem

C:\Users\Will>

Sure, it’s a small contribution (having Ruby Gems recognize IronRuby as a platform), but an important one none the less. This allows us to create gems specifically for the .NET platform, similar to the way JRuby has JVM-specific gems.

I now believe that if you’re serious about creating Rails apps, you aren’t doing it on Windows. Or, you are a masochist.

That’s a quote from me. I’m done trying to do serious Ruby & Rails development on Windows. As of January 1st, 2010, I have not found a Ruby implementation on Windows that is fast enough to support the TDD/BDD workflow that Corey Haines exhibits in his Number to LCD code kata. On top of that, I wasted 2 days on trying to get Selenium and Cucumber to work together in Windows. I was venting about this on Twitter when Cory Foy made a suggestion:

@hotgazpacho You know, I don’t know why you don’t just run a VM with Linux on it for Rails dev. That’s what I have on my Windows box.

I didn’t know why either. My first concern was memory consumption (my personal notebook only has 2 GB of RAM in it), but both Cory and Robert Dempsey allayed my fears:

@hotgazpacho 2GB should be plenty. The Linux VM should only need 512. Would help to run the VM on an external drive if you’ve got one

@cory_foy @hotgazpacho I run linux ubuntu vm’s (vmware) on my MBP and 512 is more than enough if you don’t use a heavy IDE. Runs very well

So, I went ahead and set up Ubuntu 9.10 in a VirtualBox virtual machine (VirtualBox is a free virtualization product from Sun, similar to VMWare Workstation or Microsoft Virtual PC). The results were astounding! On a Rails app I was working on, all the RSpec examples and Cucumber features ran in less than the time it took for the MingW Ruby interpreter to start up. WOW! We’re talking orders of magnitude faster, and all in less memory than it takes to boot Windows. I’m sold.

Here’s how I set up the VM:

1. Install VirtualBox
2. Create a new VB VM for Ubuntu
   The Ubuntu Community wiki has pretty good documentation (for Ubuntu host, but UI is pretty much identical on Windows)
3. Make sure the system is up-to-date (it won’t be). Let update manager run & reboot
4. Install Virtual Box additions & reboot
5. Install pre-requirements for building stuff (note: I may be missing some stuff. If I am, Ruby Enterprise Edition installer will let you know and tell you what is missing):

   1	sudo apt-get install build-essential libpcre3 libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev –y

6. Ruby Enterprise Edition (cause this is what I run on my production server)

   1	wget -c http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/66162/ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-2009.10.tar.gz        <br />tar xzvf ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-2009.10.tar.gz         <br />sudo ./ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-2009.10/installer

7. Add Ruby Enterprise Edition bin path to "secure path" for sudo

   1	sudo visudo

   Change line starting with Defaults to the following:

   1	Defaults env_reset, secure_path=/opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-2009.10/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin

8. Install gmate, which makes gEdit behave like TextMate. Instructions are on the gmate github page.
9. Make gem not install rdoc and ri by default.

   1	echo "gem: --no-rdoc --no-ri" >> ~/.gemrc

10. Install Rails, Sqlite, ZenTest, RSpec, Cucumber, & Factory Girl

    1	sudo gem i rails sqlite3-ruby ZenTest rspec cucumber factory_girl

11. Make cucumber feature running part of autospec runs

    1	echo "export AUTOFEATURE=true" >> ~/.profile

One Minor Problem…

There’s only one minor problem with this whole setup. Cory Foy articulated it best:

@hotgazpacho The problem is now you’ll /really/ not be happy doing Rails on Windows. Ever.

This is a problem I can live with

For some additional fun…

…you might want to install the following:

1. git-prompt, bash prompt with GIT, SVN and HG modules

   1	git clone git://github.com/lvv/git-prompt.git && echo ". ~/git-prompt/git-prompt.sh" >> ~/.profile

2. Autotest/Autospec notifications to Ubuntu system notifications (similar to Growl on OS X)

   1	sudo gem i test_notifier && echo "require 'test_notifier/autotest'" >> ~/.autotest

3. Sounds for Autotest events – http://www.fozworks.com/2007/7/28/autotest-sound-effects

   1	sudo apt-get install mpg321 && wget -c http://www.fozworks.com/static/autotest-sound-1_2.zip && gunzip autotest-sound-1_2.zip && echo "require '~/autotest/sound/sound.rb'" >> ~/.autotest && echo "Autotest::Sound.sound_path = '~/autotest/sound/sound_fx/'" >> ~/.autotest

Also, I’ve forked IronRuby on GitHub and have made the changes I documented on the previous post to Dev.bat. I plan to track IronRuby closely, so if you don’t want to follow all the directions (I still recommend setting up the shortcut to dev.bat), you can simply clone my repo.

Finally, Shri Borde put out a call on the IronRuby mailing list asking if anyone was interested in porting win32console to IronRuby. As Shri pointed out, this is important because Cucumber makes use of win32console on windows platforms to colorize the output of cucumber runs. This makes it much easier to visualize what works, what’s broken, and what steps you need to write. Since I have more than a passing interest in getting Cucumber working for .Net apps, I am going to pick up the gauntlet and attempt to port it myself. Behold ironruby-win32console. Now, to figure out how to do it…

1 – Install MSysGit

Head on over the the MSysGit page, grab the latest Git-1.6.x.y install, and run it. At the time of this writing, I’m using 1.6.2.2-preview20090408

2 – Grab the IronRuby sources

I prefer to do all my development work in C:\Development. Pop open a Git Bash console (Start > Programs > Git > Git Bash) and issue the following commands:

cd /C/Development
git clone git://github.com/ironruby/ironruby.git
git pull

OR, if you’re behind a corporate firewall…

cd /C/Development
git clone http://github.com/ironruby/ironruby.git
git pull

3 – Set Up IronRuby Dev Environment

This comes straight from the dev.bat entry in the IronRuby wiki on GitHub:

We recommend you start your developing by running

1	C:\path\to\Merlin\Main\Languages\Ruby\Scripts\Dev.bat

. This batch file sets up the path, various environment variables, and aliases, which makes it easy to do builds and run tests.

It is recommended to setup a shortcut to Dev.bat on the desktop that you can just click to quickly get the pre-configured environment. To do this, create a shortcut on the Desktop to cmd.exe (where C:\Development\ironruby is the root of your GIT repo) looking like CmdShortcut.png at http://www.ironruby.net/Support/Images. The values of the text fields should be like this:

Target:

1	C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /k "c:\Development\IronRuby\Merlin\Main\Languages\Ruby\Scripts\Dev.bat"

Start in:

1	c:\Development\IronRuby\Merlin\Main\Languages\Ruby

I highly recommend reading the rest of that wiki entry. It explains how the IronRuby sources are laid out.

I’m also made a change to Dev.bat. On line 43, after :EnvDone, the script changes the path. I’m going to prepend the path to the IronRuby interpreter, which we’ll compile in the next step. Why prepend? Well, I also have MRI in my path, and I found that the commands in C:\Ruby\bin were getting called instead of the IronRuby versions. This is what I believe was leading to all the difficulties I had in the past. So, the call to SET PATH should look something like this:

Addendum – June 14th, 2009

After some feedback on this post from Jimmy Schementi and Jim Deville of the IronRuby team, you’re going to want to set another environment variable, called GEM_BIN. We will reference this variable later, when we go to install gems for IronRuby. After the line that sets GEM_PATH, about line 16, you want to include this additional line:

Adding this will allow us to tell Ruby Gems where to put the scripts needed to run cucumber, or any other gem. I’ve chosen %MERLIN_ROOT%\Languages\Ruby\Scripts\Bin, on Jimmy’s suggestion, because it is already in the path set by Dev.bat, and IronRuby distributes a number of other wrapper scripts, such as igem, irake, and irails in this directory.

4 – Compile IronRuby

Pop open the IronRuby Development console (the shortcut you created in the previous step), and run

(Build RuBy Debug).

5 – Install the Cucumber Gem

IronRuby comes with a command called igem, which runs the gem command using IronRuby, as opposed to the standard MRI. In that same development console, run:

That’s a lot to type! We could stick all these options into a .gemrc file in our home directory, but this is problematic if you have and use multiple versions of Ruby on your machine (and you most likely will). Any suggestions for accommodating the scenario of multiple Ruby versions with seperate Gem locations would be very much appreciated! Now, back to the show!

I’m choosing to include the

and

because RDoc and RI generation is slooooow, and I can’t recall the last time I looked at either.

I’m also passing the

argument so that the wrapper scripts for the gems I install will be placed into a directory that is in my path, but will not get overwritten every time I recompile IronRuby.

This will install the gem files into

, where xxxx is the latest version of Cucumber. I’m going to use cucumber-xxxx in the next step to signify the folder that cucumber gets installed into.

This will also install the

wrapper scripts into

6 – Verify that it Works

Here comes the cool part. In that same IronRuby dev console window, do the following:

cd C:\Development\ironruby\Merlin\External.LCA_RESTRICTED\Languages\Ruby\redist-libs\ironruby\gems\1.8\gems\cucumber-xxxx\examples\cs
compile.bat
cucumber features

This is the output that I got:

*** WARNING: You must "gem install win32console" (1.2.0 or higher) to get colour
ed output on MRI/Windows
Feature: Addition
  In order to avoid silly mistakes
  As a math idiot
  I want to be told the sum of two numbers

unknown:0: warning: multiple values for a block parameter (2 for 1)
unknown:0: warning: multiple values for a block parameter (2 for 1)
  Scenario Outline: Add two numbers                    # features/addition.feature:6
unknown:0: warning: multiple values for a block parameter (2 for 1)
    Given I have entered
 into the calculator # features/step_definitons/calculator_steps.rb:9
unknown:0: warning: multiple values for a block parameter (2 for 1)
    And I have entered
 into the calculator   # features/step_definitons/calculator_steps.rb:9
unknown:0: warning: multiple values for a block parameter (2 for 1)
    When I press add                                   # features/step_definitons/calculator_steps.rb:13
unknown:0: warning: multiple values for a block parameter (2 for 1)
    Then the result should be 
 on the screen   # features/step_definitons/calculator_steps.rb:17

    Examples:
      | input_1 | input_2 | output |
      | 20      | 30      | 50     |
      | 2       | 5       | 7      |
      | 0       | 40      | 40     |

3 scenarios (3 passed)
12 steps (12 passed)
0m3.734s

Notice that there are still some warnings. I know John Lam and the rest of the IronRuby team are working hard for to get this working for the 1.0 release, due on or about July 23rd, 2009. Most importantly, though, it functions now. Cool beans!

SUPER KIND-OF IMPORTANT NOTE!

Any time you rebuild IronRuby, the C# compiler will erase the contents of the directory

. This includes the cucumber and cucumber.bat files. The only way I know to rectify this is to

once again. Thanks to feedback from the IronRuby team, I’ve detailed a fix above. You will only have to install gems once, regardless of how often you recompile IronRuby.

There, I said it. I know many Railers scoff at us, mock us, etc. Whatever. I run Windows (Vista, specifically). I’m a Microsoft.Net Web Developer at my day job. My company has invested heavily in the Microsoft platform. I don’t like WebForms (why is a topic for another post), and, because of Rails, I know there is a better way to do web development. Yes, I know about ASP.Net MVC, but I have yet to try it. What I have tried is Rails, and I know that a Microsoft stack is the way to get it into my day-to-day work.

So, a couple of days ago, with the announcement of Rails 2.3.0 rc1 I decided to see if I could get the latest Rails running under IIS 7 on my Vista notebook. I tried to find directions on how to accomplish this, but none were very straight forward. So, I’ve decided to document the process here for myself and other WinRailers.

Note: 2.3.0 rc1 will not work, due to this bug in Rails’ FastCGI handler. Fortunately, this was fixed and merged into the rails source. You will need the 2.3.0 gem installed, though, to generate a 2.3 Rails app. I’ll go into details below.

First, Credit where Credit is Due

I can’t take all the credit for this. The following two articles helped to guide my down my path:

• 10 steps to get Ruby on Rails running on Windows with IIS FastCGI
• Ruby on Rails in IIS 7.0 with URL Rewriter

Software You’ll Need

• IIS 7 (Windows Server 2008, or any version of Vista SP1 that has IIS)
• The Microsoft Web Platform Installer
• Ruby One-Click Installer 1.8.6-26 Final Release
• msysgit
• SQLite3

The Steps You’ll Take

1. Enable FastCGI support in IIS7
2. Install URL Rewrite module
3. Install Ruby
4. Install msysgit
5. “Install” SQLite
6. Update Rubygems
7. (gem) Install Rails
8. Create a Rails app
9. Grab the latest Rails 2.3 from github
10. web.config
11. Setup up web site in IIS

1 – Enable FastCGI support in IIS7

IIS7 supports FastCGI natively now. You just need to make sure you install CGI support. It was not obvious to me that this was needed. I was looking for a FastCGI option, but it is listed as plain old CGI. Microsoft has good directions on how to accomplish this task on their site, so I will not rehash them here.

2 – Install URL Rewrite Module

The easiest way to get this (and keep it updated!) is to use the Web Platform Installer. It might also want to install updated FastCGI support. I let this happen with no ill effects. So, go ahead a check “URL Rewrite” in the installer and go to town.

3 – Install Ruby

Luis Lavena has done an awesome job of maintaining the Ruby One Click Installer for Windows. Of particular importance to my little endeavor is that, in the One-Click Ruby Installer 1.8.6-26 Final Release, Luis included ruby-fcgi and the FastCGI C extension. Thanks, Luis! You can safely run the installer and click “Next” all the way through.

4 – Install msysgit

Rails developers use git. You need get to pull the latest source, which includes the FastCGI fix I aluded to above. msysgit is your best option. You can safely run the installer and click “Next” all the way through.

5 – “Install” SQLite

I use quotes around install because you don’t really install anything. You simply unzip the sqlite-3_6_10.zip file into any folder in your path. Personally, I create a folder,

, add that to my path, and unzip the files there. I keep other things here, too, like wget.

6 – Update Rubygems

The version packaged in the OCI is old. Save yourself trouble, open up a command prompt, and:

7 – (gem) install Rails

You need to have Rails installed. Rails 2.3.0 rc1 has some undeclared dependencies. So, first:

Next,

8 – Create a Rails app

Most of my code goes into the following folder: C:\Development. Assuming this directory does not exist:

1. Open a command prompt

2. 1

   c:

3. 1

   cd \

4. 1	mkdir Development

5. 1	cd Development

6. 1	rails myapp

9 – Grab the latest Rails from github

This is where msysgit comes in. Fire up Git Bash, and:

1. 1	cd /c/Development/myapp/vendor

2. 1	git clone git://github.com/rails/rails.git

10 – web.config

The IIS team, under Scott Guthrie (also oversees ASP.Net, particularly ASP.Net MVC), have done some awesome stuff in the last couple years. They have turned IIS 7 into, in the words of Software Journeyman Corey Haines, “A respectable web server”. I agree. IIS 7 is a lot more like Apache than it ever used to be, and I think this is a good thing.

One of the nice things is that you can now move a bunch of your web server configuration into a web.config file in your application. That means you can add it to version control

ASP.Net programmers will be intimately familiar with this file. Everyone else can think of this file as the equivalent of Apache’s .htaccess files. In our case, we’ll use the following web.config to configure both the FastCGI handler and the URL Rewrite rules:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rule name="Rewrite app_offline.html if file exists" stopProcessing="true">
  <match url="^.*$" ignoreCase="false" />
  <conditions>
    <add input="{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/app_offline.html" matchType="IsFile" ignoreCase="false" />
    <add input="{SCRIPT_FILENAME}" pattern="app_offline.html" ignoreCase="false" negate="true" />
    <add input="{SCRIPT_FILENAME}" pattern="^(.+).(png|gif|jpg|css|js)$" ignoreCase="false" negate="true" />
  </conditions>
  <action type="Rewrite" url="/app_offline.html" />
</rule>

So, let me explain what is going on here. First, the handlers section. This is where we set it up so that the FastCGI handler will process requests for dispatch.fcgi with the ruby interpreter, and run myapp in development mode. To run in production, simply replace development with production.

The next section is the URL Rewrite section. As you can see, it is much more, um, expressive than Apache’s syntax. Anyway, another cool thing Microsoft has done with IIS7 and the URL Rewrite module is an Import function. This allows you to import your existing mod_rewrite rules into their format. Cool! So, that’s what I did. I took some existing mod_rewrite rules for FastCGI, and popped it in to the UI to get the markup above.

You’ll notice a section that is commented out. That is an attempt to get the app_offline.html file working. That is, if the file exists, your app is in maintenance mode, and all requests for any Rails route should instead have this served up. I wasn’t able to get this working. Perhaps someone can take a look at it with fresh eyes.

11 – Set up web site in IIS

This one is crazy simple. Create a new website, with the physical path set to the public directory of your Rails app. So, in our case, that would be:

There is one more thing that I do, but I don’t know if it necessary. For the Application Pool that was created for this site, I change the “.Net Framework Version” to “No Managed Code”. The Rails app is not a .Net app, so I see no reason to turn on managed code for this app.

That’s about it! No, seriously. It is that easy. Don’t believe me? Open up a web browser and go to the web site you created (localhost for me). Click on “About your application’s environment”, wait a bit for the FastCGI process to spin up, and voila: