Install instructions for users of Window 10

[Sameer Siruguri]

Hi -

at the last SF Railsbridge event, we found that RailsInstaller seems to no longer work well for users of Windows 10.

It appears from their website that they only support the installation of Ruby 2.3.3, which won't work when you try to push to Heroku because Heroku requires at least 2.3.4 (or versions >= 2.4)

It also looks like the default install of Rails apps (via "rails new") gets you the 1.4 version of the SQLite3 gem, and that the native compilation of this version doesn't work on Win 10 (whereas the compilation of 1.3 does.) The installation of 1.4 looks for SQLite3 header files, and for some other C libraries that didn't seem easy to install on a Win 10 system.

During the volunteers' retro, we discussed a couple of possible options and I was wondering what other thought of these ideas:

• Modify the instructions for Win 10 to have students downgrade the sqlite3 gem version; and let them know they can't deploy to Heroku, or figure out how to upgrade Ruby on Windows.
  
• Use VirtualBox: it requires downloading the entire ISO - is that going to be a hassle for students? I remember setting up a Virtualbox environment to demo RoR to someone who had Windows, and it seemed then like it worked pretty seamlessly.
  
• Use Docker, though it seems that users need at least Win 10 Pro to use Docker on Windows.
• Skip a local install entirely and advise the use of Repl.it which we discovered now has a feature for running a RoR server via their IDE

In some ways the first option is the simplest, thought it's somewhat of a band-aid.

Thanks!

Sameer.