Cygwin and Ruby

When developing on Windows, I don't truly feel at home until I install cygwin.  I don't know how I'd live without the great command line tools like grep, less, vi, find, wc, diff, the list goes on and on.  Sure I could find Windows equivalent and dl them all, but cygwin gives it all to me right away in one place.

So when developing in Ruby, I wanted something compatible with cygwin.  I had previously installed Ruby in Windows and relied on cygwin finding the Ruby executable when I ran my Ruby code.  This is fine for just using Ruby, but when I wanted gem and irb, I was SOL.  I had to install from source.  Luckily, this was super easy:

1. Using the cygwin setup, install make, gcc, libiconv, openssl, libyaml-devel, zlib, zlib_devel and wget.
2. Then navigate to http://ruby-lang.org/ and grab the url for the source of ruby that you want to install and wget it.
1. wget http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.3-p194.tar.gz
3. Then untar it and cd into the ruby* directory
4. Run ./configure
5. Run ./make
6. Run ./make install
7. Then test it!  
1. which ruby and it should be something like /usr/local/bin/ruby

Now you have ruby, gem, irb and all the rest.