My current applications run on Linux in production, but I still develop on Windows PCs. My main works PC runs Windows 7 Pro 64bit. This isn’t too much of a problem. Just a couple of things don’t work (like wicked_pdf), but I can fire up a VirtualBox Linux image and test via that when I need to.
However, I needed to provide a production version of one of my applications for a colleague writing some documentation. In the past running a mongrel instance as a service on my PC has been great for this, but having recently upgraded to Rails 3, I’ve managed to kill my mongrel_service gem. Unfortunately reinstalling was not as easy as I thought. To get it to work I had to do the following:
Install win32-service separately and force it to install the binary version rather than build it from source. To do that:
Notice the double dash before platform. The blog where I first got this from had only one dash which caused me a little head scratching.
Then I had to install the ‘pre’ version of mongrel_service:
I found that step from this blog.
BTW, I run a command prompt as the administrator when running gem commands (right click cmd icon and select ‘run as administrator’)
Once that was done I could use the mongrel_service as usual: