Description
Installing Ruby on Windows was never the hard part — the pain is what happens after
It is the de-facto Ruby distribution for Windows; the Windows download on ruby-lang.org points here. Every major branch is tracked, x64 and ARM64 builds are both produced, and a 7z portable package is available — unpack it, add bin to PATH, and nothing on the system is touched.
Complete Ruby environment: ruby, irb, gem, bundler, rake and rdoc arrive together and
Bundled MSYS2 toolchain: the DevKit installer includes GCC and the MSYS2 package manager, so gems that compile locally pull their dependencies automatically instead of sending you hunting for a Windows compiler.
Side-by-side versions: Ruby 4.0, 3.4, 3.3 and 3.2 branches are all maintained and can live in separate directories, with switching reduced to a PATH change.
x64 and ARM64: native packages for Snapdragon Windows machines, no emulation layer needed.
Portable 7z package: skip the registry entirely — unpack and run, which suits CI images and scripts carried on a USB stick.
Open development: hosted at oneclick/rubyinstaller2 on GitHub with public build scripts, released in step with upstream Ruby.
gem install, when native C extensions like nokogiri, sqlite3 or ffi need to compile and there is no toolchain in sight. RubyInstaller ships the MSYS2 toolchain alongside Ruby, so a working build environment is there from the start and native gems install without a fight.It is the de-facto Ruby distribution for Windows; the Windows download on ruby-lang.org points here. Every major branch is tracked, x64 and ARM64 builds are both produced, and a 7z portable package is available — unpack it, add bin to PATH, and nothing on the system is touched.
Features
Complete Ruby environment: ruby, irb, gem, bundler, rake and rdoc arrive together and
ruby -v answers immediately, with no manual environment variable work.Bundled MSYS2 toolchain: the DevKit installer includes GCC and the MSYS2 package manager, so gems that compile locally pull their dependencies automatically instead of sending you hunting for a Windows compiler.
Side-by-side versions: Ruby 4.0, 3.4, 3.3 and 3.2 branches are all maintained and can live in separate directories, with switching reduced to a PATH change.
x64 and ARM64: native packages for Snapdragon Windows machines, no emulation layer needed.
Portable 7z package: skip the registry entirely — unpack and run, which suits CI images and scripts carried on a USB stick.
Open development: hosted at oneclick/rubyinstaller2 on GitHub with public build scripts, released in step with upstream Ruby.
