Development Kit

Overview

The RubyInstaller Devlopment kit is a MinGW and MSYS based environment for building C extensions. Rather than having you go to the MinGW site and telling you which packages to install, we’ve taken the pieces you need and bundled them into a single package.

QuickStart Installation

To install the Development Kit, you’ll need to have 7Zip installed.

After you’ve downloaded and extracted the files, copy the DevKit and bin into your Ruby directory (C:\Ruby for example). The files in the DevKit’s bin directory should be copied into the Ruby’s bin directory. Your ruby directory should then look like this:

        |-- bin
        |-- devkit
        |-- include
        |-- lib
        `-- share

Details

If you have ruby installed somewhere other than the default C:\Ruby directory location, you’ll need to change devkit/msys/1.0.11/etc/fstab file contents to properly point to the right directories for /mingw and /usr/local. This is usually as easy as replacing the C:/Ruby text with the directory location where you’ve installed Ruby.

For example, if you installed Ruby to D:\ruby19 you would update your devkit/msys/1.0.11/etc/fstab to look like:

D:/ruby19/devkit/gcc/3.4.5 /mingw
D:/ruby19/devkit/msys/1.0.11/usr/local /usr/local

The batch files in devkit/bin allow GCC, make and sh to be used in the extension compilation process without havign to add additional directories into the path. MsysGit does the same thing with the “git command-line” option.

Potential Issues

Simply having the DevKit installed should allow for many extensions to build without problems. However, some extensions will require headers and library files to be installed, and still others will need work done to get them to compile under MinGW.