Days ago, I was planning a demo of one Rails application to a potential client. I could bring and show it on my MacBook Pro, but it might leave the client thinking “this might not work well on Windows”. So I came up with a solution: Plug in a thumb drive, double click a shortcut, application runs on client’s Dell laptop, and here it is.

portable_ror-1.zip (9Mb)

What’s in it?

• Ruby 1.8.5 for Windows (thanks for One Click Windows Installer)
• Sqlite 3.3.7 (under ruby/bin)
• Gems: Rails, Mongrels, RSpec, Watir, ... (To minimize the file size, I removed all docs).

To Install/update a new gem
G: \ruby\bin\gem.bat install --no-rdoc --no-ri your.gem
(I didn’t want to install rdoc stuff, as it takes space and time)

Install a rails application
Assume your thumb drive was assigned as "G:", you shall see the folder

G:\ruby\gems\railsapps

Just unzip your cool rails app there.

To start a rails application

cd G:
chdir \railsapps\rvideostore
\ruby\bin\mongrel_rails start --environment development --port 5000 --log log\mongrel.log --pid log\mongrel.pid

This is the kind of thing that is not difficult to do, but may get ‘WOW’ effect.

Tags: ruby