This is something that I’ve been thinking about for months and it’s also a decision that has not been easy. However, after much deliberation, I’ve decided to stop work on the RailsInstaller project.
Background
The RailsInstaller project was started at the end of 2010 by Wayne E. Seguin as a way to get up and running with Ruby on Rails as quickly as possible on a Windows machine. If you don’t remember, at that time making sure you had a good version of Ruby, the Ruby DevKit, and your public keys configured properly just to start playing with Rails was not an easy task for the newcomer. RailsInstaller meant to solve this issue. It built on top of RubyInstaller but added some nice things, like a Command Prompt with aliases and the path already configured.
Wayne maintained RailsInstaller for a couple years and the project picked up a pretty good following. When I started working at Engine Yard in June of 2011, I was eager to help Wayne with testing and eventually building new versions. Michal Papis was also brought in to work on and eventually released a version for the Mac.
A New Maintainer
In 2013, the Windows version had lagged a bit because Wayne didn’t have the time to devote to further development. It was in the late spring that I took a two-week sabbatical from my daily work to focus on getting new RailsInstaller releases out and basically re-launch the project. I also completely re-designed the web site and created a simple introduction video.
As time went on, the project picked up a few more people to help with things like translations and building releases. In the end, though, it was still much more difficult to cut a working release than it should be and I let the project fall to the wayside.
Is There Still Life?
At the beginning of 2016, I decided to focus back on RailsInstaller a bit more. I had recently started working at uShip and I thought that it might be something that other people could benefit from. I worked to get out an updated version but there were still some lingering bugs that have still not been fixed. Check out the GitHub Issues for some context on that.
Finally, after months of trying to decide what to do, I came to decision to stop further development on RailsInstaller. With things like the Chocolatey package manager for Windows and also configuration management software, I feel that RailsInstaller is not really necessary any more.
What Now?
So where do we go from here and what does this mean going forward? It means that the project page and the GitHub repositories will stay as-is but I will not be pushing out any more releases. That being said, if someone really does think that this project is worth further development, there is always a “Fork” button and Pull Request system.
As an alternative, I encourage you to look into using Chocolatey to manage the installation of the different components from RailsInstaller. Another option is to write a Chef recipe or Ansible playbook. Those can automate installation, upgrades, and configuration. Check out my (still in early development) RubyInstaller cookbook for some ideas.
Thank You!
Lastly, I want to thank everyone who has helped with this project: wayneeseguin, mpapis, veganstraightedge, XhmikosR, luislavena, gpxl, drnic, sabelard, luigidr, nimf, kelvinst, tricknotes, alexch, metaskills, acco, edwardchiu38, jc00ke, simi, and zzak. Without your commits and assistance, this project would not have been possible. I cannot thank you enough, but here’s a picture to help:
