RubyInstaller has an RC2 version of Ruby 1.8.7-p249.

Base installation is a snap. Click download, run, next, click accept, next, click “Add Ruby executables to your PATH”, install, finish.

This currently comes with RubyGems 1.3.5. RubyGems 1.3.6 is out and contains a fix that makes it easier to install the Rails beta, so:

gem update --system

This will cause warnings later, which can be avoided by doing the following:

gem uninstall rubygems-update

Next, to install sqlite3, download and unzip both precompiled binaries for Windows for the command-line and DLL without the TCL bindings, exploded the zip files, and copy the results to you C:\ruby\bin directory. The result should look something like this:

Directory of C:\Ruby\bin 01/05/2010 06:30 PM 3,744 sqlite3.def 01/05/2010 06:30 PM 511,383 sqlite3.dll 01/05/2010 06:31 PM 530,762 sqlite3.exe 3 File(s) 1,045,889 bytes

Next install the ruby bindings to sqlite3:

gem install sqlite3-ruby

Finally, install the rails beta:

gem install rails --pre

The rails command provided with the first beta doesn’t work with Windows. You can try Torsten Maul’s fix, but I opted to fix the C:\ruby\bin\rails.bat file instead:

@ECHO OFF IF NOT "%~f0" == "~f0" GOTO :WinNT @"ruby.exe" "script/rails" %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9 GOTO :EOF :WinNT @"ruby.exe" "script/rails" %*

Once this was complete, the initial test results look pretty good. The only error reported in this test has to do with the automation of the execution of irb from my script, and not a failure with Ruby or Rails itself.