Get all Ruby C extensions to work in Windows with andLinux

2008-01-23T00:40:00.008+08:00

Ruby is fun to work with. But sometimes, it just does not play well with Windows, it works better in Linux! Many plugins or gems (like xmlparser, xmlscan and uconv for rss library, and EventMachine, rack for thin) require compiling C code, that is usually difficult to install for Windows user, until some kind people make a Windows binary. Some libraries (like newer versions of BackgrounDRb) do not work on Windows at all. Ruby interpreter on Linux is also faster. One of my Rails app runs 2 times faster in Linux! So, why not install Linux inside Windows?

andLinux is a complete Linux system running seemlessly in Windows. It uses CoLinux as its core and runs Linux Kernel natively. It achieves performance near that of a standalone Linux. And the resource requirements are also low, especially when compared with traditional virtualization solutions, such as VMWare and Virtual PC. I have been using andLinux for few months and I am happy with it. My benchmark with thin was also done in andLinux!

OK, enough for introduction. Here are the steps I took to prepare Ruby and Rails development environment with andLinux. It tooks me 15 min manual work + 2 hours of downloading, compiling and installing.

Install andLinux

Go to andLinux download page download and run Beta 1 (minimal version) installer
Choose "run andllinux manually as a NT service + use windows shortcuts" such that andLinux run transparently in background
Choose "Using cofs (easy configuration)" then input D:\my\path, this path would be available in andLinux at ~/windows
Installer would setup Windows service and network interface in Windows
Restart Windows
After restart, you can use net start andlinux to start andLinux at background (when need to shutdown andLinux, run net stop andlinux)
Double click on the shortcut "andLinux Console (NT)"
Login with root with empty password. You are now connected to andLinux terminal, right inside your Windows!
Run passwd to setup password

Setup SSH

Assume you have Cygwin with SSH installed, run ssh-user-config in bash to generate SSH keys if this was never done
By default, andLinux has IP address of 192.168.11.150
Run scp -r ~/.ssh root@192.168.11.150:~/.ssh copy SSH keys to andLinux
Now, you can run ssh root@192.168.11.150 to login andLinux
The andLinux Menu icon at the lower right corner is no longer neccessary for me, it can be disabled by running msconfig, in Startup tab, uncheck XFCE Menu (andLinux) and Xming (andLinux), and click OK

Install non-Ruby packages

andLinux comes with handful package management system - APT. Run the following commands in andLinux to install non-Ruby packages. You can install more packages in one line to save manual time. You may exclude Subversion, MySQL or SQLite if you are not using them

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get install build-essential openssl libssl-dev libopenssl-ruby libreadline5 libreadline5-dev libzlib-ruby libyaml-ruby subversion git-core mysql-server libmysqlclient15-dev libmysql-ruby sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev ruby1.8 irb ri rdoc ruby1.8-dev

Install Ruby packages

Unfortunately, APT does not give you up-to-date Ruby interpreter, which cause problems with many Ruby packages. We need to install Ruby interpreter on our own.

Go to Ruby download page and download latest stable 1.8 tar ball (e.g. wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.6-p111.tar.gz)
Extract (e.g. tar zxvf ruby-1.8.6-p111.tar.gz), compile and install Ruby interpreter (./configure; make; make install)
Go to RubyGems download page and download latest tar ball
Extract and run ruby setup.rb
Install gems for Rails development: gem install --no-ri --no-rdoc rails mysql sqlite3-ruby mongrel ruby-debug
You can certainly install your favourite gems as you like

That's it! The best of it is we can archive whole directory and take to anywhere. Happy Ruby development!

Thin - A Ruby web server that is really fast

2008-01-12T00:58:00.001+08:00

There was a burst of posts (and here and there) around discussing a new Ruby web server - Thin, that is faster than Mongrel or so. But I have never seen any real statistics except the chart from Thin web site.

I have made a similar test on one of my Rails page and here is it (Google Spreadsheet):

Requests per sec	WEBrick 1.3.1	Mongrel 1.1.3	Thin 0.5.0
1 con. req.	62.21	92.44	101.32
5 con. req.	58.97	88.58	104.88
500 con. req.	1.17% Failed	66.36	95.74

Improvement with Thin	WEBrick 1.3.1	Mongrel 1.1.3	Thin 0.5.0
1 con. req.	63%	10%	0%
5 con. req.	78%	18%	0%
500 con. req.	Failed	44%	0%

Thin gives 10-20% performance improvements over Mongrel, for free! Although its Rails support is still in alpha status, it did show any errors during my test. Anyway, Thin author does suggest using Thin for production environment yet. After Zed Shaw (author of Mongrel) has divorced with Mongrel, Thin could probably the next Rails web server to look at.