By Alvin Alexander. Last updated: June 4, 2016
Earlier tonight I installed JRuby on a Windows XP system, and it was about as easy as anything I've installed. Here were the steps on my computer:
- Download JRuby. It currently comes as a file that is tar'd and gzip'd.
- I'm a little slow, so I tend to run gunzip and tar separately. First I run gunzip like this:
gunzip jruby-java4-bin-0.9.2.tar.gz
. This gives me a tar file namedjruby-java4-bin-0.9.2.tar
- I unpacked that file with this command:
tar xvf jruby-java4-bin-0.9.2.tar
- This gave me a directory named
jruby-0.9.2
- I moved this directory to the root of my C: drive, so it is located at
C:\jruby-0.9.2
- I right-clicked on "My Computer", chose "Properties", then clicked the "Advanced" tab, then clicked the "Environment Variables" button
- I created a new environment variable named
JRUBY_HOME
and pointed it toC:\jruby-0.9.2
- I modified the
PATH
environment variable to point toC:\jruby-0.9.2\bin
That's all I had to do. Then I opened a new DOS/cmd window -- as far as I know you have to do this whenever you change an environment variable as I've done it -- and then ran a sample program given in the JRuby tutorial, and everything just worked. :) Many thanks to the JRuby people for making this a simple installation.