Luckily for me, it turns out that Microsoft’s own Windows Subsystem for Linux is up to the task of providing a drama-free solution for working in a Linux environment within Windows. There’s also the option of using something like Cygwin to create an environment very close to what you’d see in a Linux distribution. This can become a problem if you need to actively work on Windows-based projects as well. The dual boot scenario gets rid of any performance degradation but then you have to go through the hassle of restarting anytime you want to work in a different OS. So, having your entire development environment in one can get annoying after a while. Virtual machines, depending on how you set them up and for graphical interfaces specially, can take a bit of a performance hit when compared to running the OS natively. Provided you can set something like these up, these solutions can work beautifully, but they can have drawbacks. Assuming they would like/need to keep using Windows as their main OS, they could virtualize some version of Linux using something like Hyper-V or VitrualBox, or go dual boot with a native Linux installation on their current hardware. Great, but what is a Windows guy like me to do under these circumstances? Well, there are a few options.

You can jump to the summary at the bottom of the article to get a quick idea of what we’re going to do over the next few minutes.Īnyway, I’ve since learned that the vast majority of the Ruby and Rails community uses either macOS or some flavor of Linux as their operating system of choice. In this post, I’m going to be talking about how to avoid these pitfalls by setting up your development environment using the Windows Subsystem for Linux on Windows 10 Pro. One of these gems is, surprisingly, sqlite3, a gem that’s needed to even complete the official Getting Started tutorial over on. Second: I’ve run into issues while compiling native extensions for certain gems. First: RubyInstaller, the most mainstream method for getting Ruby on Windows, is not available for every version of the interpreter. In my experience, there are two main roadblocks when trying to do this. There’s one truth that I quickly discovered as I went into my first real foray into Ruby and Rails development: Working with Rails in Windows sucks.

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