[BioRuby] Installing & testing BioRuby on Windows

[Peter Cock]

Hi all,

Again I thought it would be useful to write down what I did to get
BioRuby running on my Windows XP 32 bit machine (which will
be a buildslave). Note I have some things already installed, like git.

1. Download http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/75465/rubyinstaller-1.9.3-p0.exe
2. Run it, using default options except I ticked "Add Ruby executables
to your PATH"

Otherwise the path installed to will be C:\Ruby193 or similar, and thus
version dependent, which I anticipate will complicate things for the
buildbot setup.

I then tried the BioRuby tests which confirmed it was missing the
next two gems (although there were some other errors, e.g.
in the sanger_chromatogram example).

3. gem install libxml-ruby
4. gem install soap4r-ruby1.9
5. git clone git://github.com/bioruby/bioruby.git
6. cd bioruby
7. ruby test/runner.rb

Error message popped up three times, typed in by hand:

ruby.exe - Unable to Locate Component
This application has failed to start because libxml2-2.dll was not found.
Re-installing the application my fix this problem.
[OK]

Perhaps the gem install wasn't quite right? Or it doesn't actually
link to the DLL properly? I could find the DLL here,

C:\Ruby193\lib\ruby\gems\1.9.1\gems\libxml-ruby-2.2.2-x86-mingw32\lib\libs\libxml2-2.dll

The following StackOverflow question looked relevant, although
on a much older version of Ruby:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4323234/

I tried the work around mentioned and copied the 3 DLL files in that
folder to C:\Ruby193\bin - that solved the missing DLL error message,
but seems like a hack.

After that there were 4 failures and 7 errors, which I will cover in the
next email.

Peter

--------------------------------------------------

C:\repositories\bioruby>gem install libxml-ruby
Fetching: libxml-ruby-2.2.2-x86-mingw32.gem (100%)
Successfully installed libxml-ruby-2.2.2-x86-mingw32
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for libxml-ruby-2.2.2-x86-mingw32...
Installing RDoc documentation for libxml-ruby-2.2.2-x86-mingw32...

C:\repositories\bioruby>gem install soap4r-ruby1.9
Fetching: soap4r-ruby1.9-2.0.3.gem (100%)
Successfully installed soap4r-ruby1.9-2.0.3
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for soap4r-ruby1.9-2.0.3...
Installing RDoc documentation for soap4r-ruby1.9-2.0.3...