Ruby on Rails 7: Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

For me, using Windows as a development environment only made sense for dotnet languages, such as Visual Basic and C#. The idea of writing Ruby on Windows never felt natural.

However, with the advent of the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), Microsoft promises to provide the best of both worlds. As I recently switched my machine from Fedora to Windows 10, I thought I’d experiment to see whether I could be pursuaded.

First, I downloaded Windows Terminal from the Microsoft Store. This neat application will allow us to manage WSL.

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

WSL leverages virtualisation technology to allow Linux distributions on Windows. With each Linux distribution running inside its own isolated container.

The installation for WSL is a quick oneliner:

wsl --install

Installation of the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

This command will enable WSL v2 and download a Ubuntu instance. Once complete, set up your user account and give your machine a quick reboot. Further information can be found here.

That’s it, just one command was needed. To launch the Ubuntu instance, simply right-click the Windows Terminal application and select Ubuntu.

Selecting the Ubuntu instance.

You can also set Ubuntu to be the default profile in the settings:

Setting default profile to Ubuntu in the Terminal configuration.

Now that we have WSL setup with ubuntu, lets configure the shell.

ZSH

Install ZSH and set it as the default shell:

sudo apt install zsh

Run zsh and select option 2.

Selecting option 2 produces a standard zsh configuration file.

Change the default terminal shell from BASH to ZSH:

sudo chsh -s $(which zsh)

Restart the terminal and confirm you’re using ZSH:

echo $SHELL

This should output /usr/bin/zsh or similar.

Making ZSH beautiful

Install ohmyzsh:

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

Installing ohmyzsh.

Select a theme and set it inside the ZSH_THEME attribute of your .zshrc file. I like half-life.

The ZSH_THEME field is set to half-life.

ASDF

Time to install a Ruby version manager. Most Ruby developers I’ve met use rbenv or Ruby Version Manager (RVM) but asdf is an all in one version manager for pretty much every programming language out there.

sudo apt install curl git; git clone https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf.git ~/.asdf --branch v0.13.1

Once asdf has been downloaded, add the following to the bottom of your ~/.zshrc file:

. "$HOME/.asdf/asdf.sh"

Restart your terminal and confirm asdf is installed:

asdf --version

Further information for installing and configuring ASDF can be found here.

ASDF works a little different to other ruby version managers. As it provides version management for a variety of languages, you have to select a relevant plugin to add. In our case we will add ruby:

asdf plugin add ruby

That was simple enough, now lets install Ubuntu’s dependencies for Ruby:

sudo apt-get install autoconf patch build-essential rustc libssl-dev libyaml-dev libreadline6-dev zlib1g-dev libgmp-dev libncurses5-dev libffi-dev libgdbm6 libgdbm-dev libdb-dev uuid-dev

If that was all successful, you can install the latest version of ruby with:

asdf install ruby latest

At the time of this article, the latest version was 3.3.0.

asdf installing the latest version of Ruby.

If this compiled correctly, you can then set the global system version of ruby and check its working:

asdf global ruby latest
ruby -v

The latest version of Ruby is set for global access.

Rails

Now that ruby is working, let’s install Rails:

gem install rails

You can then check it is installed:

rails -v

Lastly, you can make a new Rails project and spin it up:

rails new example_project
cd example_project
bundle exec rails s

You should then be able to access your Rails application here.

Rails web application is successfully running.