[ANN] Instant Rails 1.0 preview1 Released

Curt Hibbs
Tue, 11 Oct 2005 21:56:09 -0000

A preview release of Instant Rails 1.0 for Windows is available for
download.
There are still a number of rough edges, but it is essentially functional
and
usable (see a list of planned changes for the 1.0 release at the end).

Instant Rails is a one-stop Rails runtime solution containing Ruby, Rails,
Apache, and MySQL, all preconfigured and ready to run. No installer, you
simply drop it into the directory of your choice and run it. It does not
modify your system environment.

This release of Instant Rails for Windows, but there are plans for ports
to Linux, BSD, and OSX.

Instant Rails includes the full source code of the cookbook application
developed in the [Rolling with Ruby on Rails] tutorial. Once you have
installed Instant Rails, you can verify that everything is working properly
by running this cookbook application.

Instant Rails includes a number of open source software packages. Below is a
list of all included software.

Primary Instant Rails Components
===============================
* [Instant Rails Manager] 1.0 preview1

* [Ruby 1.8.2] (from the [One-Click Ruby Installer] 182-15)

* [Ruby on Rails] 0.13.1

* [Apache] 1.3.33

* [MySQL] 4.1.9

* [SCGI] 1.7

* [SCGI Rails Runner] 0.3.1

* [phpMyAdmin] 2.6.1

Ancillary Instant Rails Components
=================================
These components are not the primary focus of Instant Rails, but are
included
because the primary components above depend upon them..

* [PHP] 4.3.10

* [Rake] 0.6.2

* [cmdparse] 2.0.0


Install & Verify
===============
Follow these steps to install Instant Rails and verify that it is working
properly:

* Download and unzip the Instant Rails zip file.

* Start InstantRails?.exe.

* Instant Rails will detect that it is being started from a new
directory and ask if you want to have it update the paths in the
all of the configuration files... Just say yes.

* Click on the I button to drop down the main menu and select
Configure > Windows Hosts file.

* In the editor that pops up, add this line to the end of the file:

127.0.0.1 <http://127.0.0.1> www.mycookbook.com
<http://www.mycookbook.com>

* Save the change and exit the editor.

* In the main menu, select Rails Applications > Manage Rails Applications...

* Check the checkbox next to the cookbook application.

* Click on the Start SCGI button.

* Once the SCGI server says that it is listening to
127.0.0.1:9999<http://127.0.0.1:9999>,
open
our browser and go to:

www.mycookbook.com <http://www.mycookbook.com>

You should now be using a running Rails application! Poke around in the
menus
to see what''s there.

Desired Changes for 1.0 Release
==============================
* Use Apache2 instead of Apache 1.3

* Run SCGI Rails Runner in the background as a service.

* Allow mutliple SCGI Rails Runner processes to service requests for
a single Rails application. SRR already allows this on Linux, but
it still needs to be implemented on Windows.

* Use the C-based MySQL driver for for Ruby (currently the
Ruby-based driver is used).