Setting Up a Windows Development Environment

If you would like to be able to build FXRuby from source on Windows, and perhaps even contribute patches back to the project, you’re going to need to set up a development environment. This page describes how to set up an FXRuby development environment based on the developer kit from the RubyInstaller project.

Set Up the Build Environment

For starters, you need to follow the instructions on the Setting Up a Windows Build Environment page. So go do that, then come back here when you’re done.

Download, Build and Install SWIG

We use a very, very old version of SWIG to generate the wrapper code for FXRuby. Actually, this is only true for the “1.6” branch of FXRuby, but that’s the one that you’ll probably be dealing with. You can download the source tarball for SWIG version 1.3.22 from the SWIG downloads page and then build and install it.

tar xzf swig-1.3.22.tar.gz
cd SWIG-1.3.22
./configure
make
make install

Download and Install msysGit

Perhaps this goes without saying, but if you want to be able to check out the FXRuby code, you’re going to need to have Git installed. For GitHub’s take on this, be sure to see their guide on using Git and GitHub on Windows. You can download it from the msysGit project page. Follow the instructions there to get things working on your development machine.

Check out the Code

If you think you’ll want to make changes to the FXRuby code, and possibly submit patches back to the project, you’ll want to fork the project and then check out your forked version. Otherwise, you can just do a regular git clone of the FXRuby repository:

git clone git://github.com/lylejohnson/fxruby.git

and then check out the 1.6 branch:

git checkout 1.6

In either case, refer to the GitHub guides for more information about these things are done.