Setting up Rails 3 with PostgreSQL on Windows

The following guide shows you how to seperately install everything needed to get Rails 3 with PostgreSQL on Windows up and running.

Installing Ruby

Go to rubyinstaller.org and download Ruby and DevKit (Development Kit, needed to build the PostgreSQL-extension ‘pg’).
Simply install Ruby by following the instructions on screen (I also checked “Add Ruby executables to your PATH”):


After the installation has finished you can continue with adding DevKit to your Ruby installation.

Adding DevKit to Ruby

Since DevKit is a self-extracting archive, you don’t need to install it so you can extract its content to lets say C:\DevKit. To merge it into your Ruby installation you have to run the installation script in the following order:

1. Open the windows console and change into the DevKit directory: cd C:\DevKit
2. Type ruby dk.rb init to generate the file config.yml
3. Enter ruby dk.rb install to finally install DevKit into your Ruby.

If everything went OK with DevKit, your console output should look exactly like this:


For additional information on the DevKit installation and testing visit their wiki at github.

Installing PostgreSQL

Visit the project’s official page and download the one click installer.
Very important: Choose an installation directory which doesn’t contain any spaces (I chose C:\PostgreSQL\9.0 as seen below)…

When you decide to select a Postgres installation path containing white-spaces, you’ll probably run into trouble later when using bundle to include pg with an error ending with –includedir Errno::ENOENT so you’d better select an install path without any space in.
Don’t forget to extend your PATH variable so that it includes the bin and lib directories of your PostgreSQL installation:

Installing Rails

Open a new console to make sure you already have the recently extended path variable. Then just type
gem install rails
to fetch the latest version of the Rails-Framework.
Now, we’re almost done.
Create a new rails project by typing
rails new appname -d postgresql

The -d parameter tells rails to add the PostgreSQL database settings so you only have to add your connection parameters in config/database.yml.

Next, you must actually add support for PostgreSQL by adding pg using the bundle installer.
Change into your newly created project directory and type
bundle config build.pg --with-pg-config=C:\PostgreSQL\9.0\bin\pg_config.exe

Now that you’ve added the config parameters for pg you can type
bundle install
and pg will be added.
Don’t forget to create your database using
rake db:create
Fire up the development server with rails server and open the URL http://localhost:3000. After clicking About your application’s environment you should see your environment information like below:

Congratulations

Now you have successfully set up Rails 3 with PostgreSQL on Windows!
If something goes wrong during installation, please leave a post. I will answer it as soon as possible!
Thanks for reading, I hope this how-to can help you a bit.