Hi Guys,

In my previous article, Don’t hesitate to try out new things in Ruby on Rails, you got to know, how to install and configure pik to support multiple versions of Ruby on Windows.

In this article, I will add another simpler way to install pik on windows and configuring it for multiple versions of ruby. For Devkit, you can follow the same old article.

NOTE: I will go with Ruby192 and on that Ruby187 and so on… You can accomplish it in a reverse mode as well.

Step1: Download Ruby193 from here. Do install the RubyInstaller version i.e .exe file.

Step2: After downloading, Install it (click on that checkbox which will say, add Ruby to your environmental variables path).

Step3: Once the installation is done, open a command window and type:
ruby -v
It will tell you that, current Ruby is 1.9.3

Step4: Install the pik gem. Type:
gem install pik

Step5: Type- pik_install C:/tools

Step6: Add this path to your Environmental variables
My Computer > Right Click > Properties > Advanced System Settings > Environmental Variables > Path

Step7: Now, go to RubyInstaller.org and download the 7-zip archive of Ruby187 i.e Ruby 1.8.7-p358.

Step8: Once the download is finished, extract all the content of that file inside C:\ folder, using 7-zip utility. After extracting, rename the folder to Ruby187.

Step9: Open a new command window and type:
pik add C:\Ruby187\bin

Yuppy!! it will add 187 into the existing versions of Ruby. From here you can install ‘N’ number of Ruby versions on Windows.

Advantages of doing this:

If using Netbeans, you can now easily configure/add/manage multiple versions of Ruby.
If you follow the old approach, your pik version of Ruby won’t able to include the DevKit, due to which you may face problems, while installing Native extension gems. For e.g consider this path: C:/Users/foo bar/.pik/rubies/. It contains a space between foo and bar. So devkit skips this many of the times.
Happy coding…
Your feebback/suggestions are always welcome.