The goal of Portable Ruby is to reduce those updates to a single place, your USB drive. About.com describes how to make this possible:

Installing Ruby

The easiest way to setup a Portable Ruby application is to start with an existing Ruby installation. I recommend the One-Click Installer. If you haven’t done so already, go ahead and install it.

The entire Ruby distribution is created in a single “ruby” directory structure. Additional changes include the creation of shortcuts for the start menu, which we will simulate in the PortableApp menu. The One-Click Installer also updates the Windows PATH environment variable to include the ruby\bin directory.

Layout the PortableApp Structure

Another helpful tip is to install PortableApps to the root of your hard drive so you can easily test the integration of your Portable Ruby development. Using the earlier articles as a reference, install PortableApps to “C:\PortableRoot”.

The next step is to create a standard PortableApp directory structure. To make this easy, you can download the Ruby Portable Template starter zip. In addition to the directory structure, the starter zip also contains files for creating the Ruby and SciTE Portable launchers.

Unzip the Ruby Portable Template inside of the directory “C:\PortableRoot\PortableApps\”. Your directory structure should look similar to the following.

• C:\PortableRoot
  • PortableApps
    • OtherApps
    • RubyPortable
      • App
        • AppInfo
        • ruby
      • Data
        • settings
      • Other
        • RubyPortableSource
        • RubySource

At this point, you can copy the contents of the “ruby” directory the One-Click Installer created into the RubyPortable -> App -> ruby directory.

Check your free space first. The directory is about 80MB, but I would plan on having additional free space for your projects. Once you have copied the Ruby directories over, you can uninstall the One-Click Installer. While this isn’t technically necessary, it is helpful to remove the changes to the Windows environment so they do not conflict with testing your setup of the Portable Ruby application.

More information and instructions are available on About.com: Ruby page.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 6:31 am and is filed under Cool, Reviews, Ruby, Tips, Tools, Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.