• Top
• Assumptions, pre-reqs, and personal background
• Windows Insider Program
• Windows Subsystem for Linux v2 (WSL2)
• Windows Terminal
• Installing Ruby on Rails
• Installing Postgresql
• Creating a New Rails App
• Getting to the Rails App in Linux from Visual Studio Code on Windows
• Explorer.exe and the WSL
• Final Database Configuration and Setup
• Running the Rails App
• Wrapping Up
• Next steps

Assumptions, pre-reqs, and personal background

As with any how-to in the dev community, there are some pre-reqs and some assumptions in mine. They are:

• Have access to a computer.
• Have a valid copy of Windows 10 installed on said computer.
• The ability to install Preview versions of Windows on that machine.
• Administrator priveleges on that Windows install.
• Have an internet connnection.
• Some knowledge on how to use the command line in Windows/Linux.
• Install Visual Studio Code
• Have a GitHub account already setup.
• Know that having to google things and being confused is normal when learning something new 😊.

Some personal info about my background going into this:

• I've been coding for over a decade.
• I code mostly .Net stack, along with front end development.
• I have used other programming languages in limited capacities in the past, including PHP and Go.
• I have attempted to start coding in Ruby on Rails in the past a couple times, all failures.
• I have some vague familiarity with what Ruby on Rails is due to Asp.net MVC being heavily influenced by Ruby on Rails and being curious about Ruby on Rails in general.
• I have a small understanding of what the Windows Subsystem for Linux is, but I have never attempted to use it or understand it outside of reading a few blog posts.
• I have virtually no understanding of postgresql, though I have a lot of experience using MS SQL Server and some knowledge of MySql and Sqlite.

Windows Insiders

The first thing Scott mentions after his opening paragraph is to get a recent version of Windows. This does not mean make sure you have Windows updated. As of the time of this writing, it means get a preview version of Windows. The preview version of Windows has version 2 of the Windows Subsystem for Linux (detailed more below). If I was going to follow what Scott was doing, I needed to start with getting that preview version of Windows. That meant becoming a Windows Insider.

Becoming a Windows Insider is as simple as filling out a simple form. You'll need a Microsoft account of some sort, but that is a pretty low barrier to entry. The sign up process is rather easy.

The tricky part, for me at least, was actually getting the preview editions of Windows installed. Once I was signed up, I needed to sign in to my computer with my Microsoft account, which I had never done before. Easy enough.

Once you do that you are supposed to be able to go to the Windows Insider Program Settings in Windows and download a preview version of Windows. In the Windows Insider Program Settings, I see a button that says 'Get Started'.

I could not get the 'Get Started' button to work. Everytime I clicked on it, I got one of two errors. Googling these errors, you get a wide variety of solutions and suggestions of things to try. These error messages seem to be related to Windows Updates in general, so I go to the Windows Update settings in Windows to see if that works. Sure enough, Windows Update works fine. My computer is completely up to date.

After many attempts to get this button working, I threw in the towel. Turns out, you don't need to have that working to get the preview edition of Windows installed. The ISOs are available to download in the Windows Insiders site. So that's what I ended up doing and it was super simple.

So my advice is, if you see those error messages when clicking that 'Get Started' button, don't even bother trying to fix it unless you really really want to. Just go to the website and download the ISO manually. You'll save yourself a lot of time and frustration.

Once the ISO is downloaded, you just need to right click it from an explorer window, select Mount, and then click the setup.exe file. Follow the simple setup instructions and after a while the Windows preview edition will have finished installing.

Windows Subsystem for Linux v2 (WSL2)

Now that the newest preview edition of Windows was installed, I was able to get the Windows Subsystem for Linux up and running with Ubuntu 18.04. That was pretty painless. As Scott pointed to in his blog, follow these instructions for setting up WSL2 and you'll be golden.

Windows Terminal

Scott suggests installing Windows Terminal, but after installing it and trying to use, it still feels a bit raw to me, particularly the settings configuration. That's not a knock on JSON or JSON based configuration, but having your settings all defined via JSON with virtually no guidance on what to do in that JSON means me investing time into something that I really don't need to do.

For my terminal, launching the Ubuntu LTS install on Windows brings up a fine enough terminal window. No fuss, just works. Scott does have a guide on how to get the Windows Terminal all customized, but that seemed like a tangent that I did not want to follow. Maybe another day.

Installing Ruby on Rails

At this point, I feel like I'm ready to get cooking: I can finally start installing Ruby on Rails 😁😁😁. Scott's article links to this page on how to install Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu 18.04. I have to say, the instruction provided on that site for installing Ruby on Rails are pretty spot on. I only had a couple issues with their instructions, but that was only with the Postgresql portion of the instructions (those issues are detailed below). Getting Ruby on Rails itself installed went super well. One small note is that at one point, one command (I can't remember which) takes a particularly long time to finish running. That's not really an issue, but the thing that made me nervous was that it didn't output anything to the terminal window for a long time. It made me think something had gone wrong. I eventually just let it be and walked away for a while. After an hour or so I came back to my computer and it had finished doing whatever it was doing without an issue.

Installing Postgresql

The issue I ran into with the Postgresql was that I didn't have the necessary repositories installed in the Ubunutu instance to get the packages for installing Postgresql. The instructions on the install page for Ruby on Rails page did not detail how to do that, but another page I found did.

In case that page disappears, the commands for installing the repositories are:
sudo apt-get install wget ca-certificates
wget --quiet -O - https://www.postgresql.org/media/keys/ACCC4CF8.asc | sudo apt-key add -
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt/ `lsb_release -cs`-pgdg main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pgdg.list'

I only followed Step 1 on that page. After completing Step 1, I went back to the Ruby on Rails install steps. I was still getting issues trying to get the 'sudo apt install postgres-11 libpq-dev' command to work. Turns out I had to run 'sudo apt-get update' in order for the newly installed repository to be registered or something like that.

After I ran that, I ran into another issue with the Postgres install steps. The 'createuser' command came back at me with the error message 'createuser could not connect to database postgres no such file or directory'. ???

I tried 2 commands in an attempt to get around this error. First I tried this commandI tried is specified in the output when you run 'sudo apt install postgres-11 libpq-dev': pg_ctcluster 11 main start.

Running the 'pg_ctcluster 11 main start' command returned the error 'Error: You must runt his program as the cluster owner (postgres) or root'. I had no idea what that meant, so I did some googling on the original '.. no such file or directory' error message. I eventually came across the command 'sudo service postgresql start'. After running that command, the createuser command worked fine.

Creating a New Rails App

I was now at the point in the instructions that said to create a new rails app. The instructions have 3 commands: one for sqlite, one for mysql, and one for postgresql. I used the postgresql command. This command took a few minutes to finish. Eventually it finished. The instructions at this point say to update the database config file to include the user/password info that you provided when setting up postgresql for the postgresql db connection. I figured this would be a good time to hop out of the Ubuntu terminal and test the WSL2 functionality from VS Code.

Getting to the Rails App in Linux from Visual Studio Code on Windows

After opening Visual Studio Code on my Windows install, I installed the Remote- WSL extension. After installing that extension I clicked on this little green icon at the bottom-left of the VSCode window. Navigating through the provided options that popped up, I was able to select the Ubuntu-18.04 distro.

Clicking the Ubuntu distro caused VSCode to open a new VSCode window. This new window seemed to be attempting to connect to the Ubuntu instance I had selected. Sure enough, after a few seconds, I was able to select the directory of the myapp that I had created, just as if I was running that VSCode window on a Linux instance. That is pretty crazy.

Explorer.exe and the WSL

Following all this I go back to Scotts post. He says, from the terminal window, I can run "explorer.exe ." to open an explorer window. Pay special attention to the space and period at the end of that command. Without that space and period, it will just open an explorer window with its default starting location for your Windows install. it took me a minute to notice that period. After entering the full command, I was able to see my Ubuntu directory just fine.

Final Database Configuration and Setup

At this point, I'm almost ready to start running the Rails app, but there is still a couple things left to do. The config/databases.yml file in the Rails app needed to be updated with the credentials that I had entered when setting up the postgresql DB. I update the dev, test, and production databases in the yml file to have my user/password creds.

The last thing that needs to be done before I run the app is to run the 'rake db:create' in the myapp directory in the Ubuntu terminal. I do that and get the following output. Seems like the dev and test DBs got created. Got a couple of warnings, but they don't seem like big deals to me at this point.

Running the Rails App

Per Scott's suggestion I run the rails app using 'rails server -b=0.0.0.0' which will allow me to navigate to the site using localhost:3000. I did this from the Ubuntu terminal. After running the command, everything worked. I could browse to http://localhost:3000 on my windows machine and see the website running!

Wrapping Up

At this point, I feel like I can really start my Ruby on Rails learning. I want to extend a huge thanks to the following:

• To Scott Hansleman for his post on how to get this setup.
• To the GoRails team for their easy to follow instructions.
• To the people working on WSL and VSCode for making 'magic' happen.
• To Cassidy Williams for motivating me to write about things.

Next Steps

My next steps are not well thought out at the moment. Once I decide on what to do next, I'll document what I do as I do it and post about it here.