undesigned

I am a heretic. I develop Rails apps on Windows. I own a Macbook, but I usually boot it into Windows. Justin thinks I should just should just move to developing on a Mac. I keep holding out. But periodically I try to install a gem that needs to compile native extensions for Windows, and it fails. This just makes me mad. My latest encounter was with the bcrypt gem. I did some googling and finally found a solution:

1. Dug up my old copy of Visual Studio 6 CDs and installed the command line utilities. Apparently, not just any version will do; you have to be in sync with the version used to compile ruby.
2. Added VS6’s bin directories to my Windows path. Default install locations are:
   C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VC98\Bin;C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\Common\MSDev98\Bin;

   Alternatively, you can get a command prompt in  C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VC98\Bin and run VCVARS32.BAT to add those directories to your path.

3. Added some typedefs and a function to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VC98\Include\SYS\TYPES.H that are not available on Windows:

   #ifndef _UINT_T_DEFINED
   typedef unsigned char  u_int8_t;
   typedef unsigned short u_int16_t;
   typedef unsigned int   u_int32_t;
   typedef unsigned __int64 u_int64_t;
   #define _UINT_T_DEFINED
   #endif

   #ifndef snprintf
   #define snprintf _snprintf
   #endif

Now I can do:

gem install bcrypt-ruby

I get the “Building native extensions. This could take a while…” message and it works!

I’m happy once again. I’m satisfied. And I didn’t even have to change religions.

Posted on May 11th, 2009 by joel
Filed under: rails, web development