A big step for Ruby/Rails on Windows 10
Over at InfoQ, Obie Fernandez writes about RubySSPI, a gem written by Justin Bailey which allows for NTLM proxy authentication for Ruby on Windows.
At the old corporate job, I couldn't gem install rails. It didn't work because our corporate PCs were sitting behind an ISA server. Instead, I had to download each gem (ActiveRecord, ActionPack, etc.) separately, and install each one not knowing the dependencies. It's a pain. I imagine that many of you who are working at Microsoft shops are experiencing the same or similar issues. As Obie points out, this is obviously a big hurdle for those people who are trying to experiment with or, more importantly, sell Rails into their day jobs.
The inability to do gem install was a big mental barrier to adoption in some Microsoft-heavy shops where I've tried to introduce Ruby and Rails. It was also a huge (and constantly recurring) pain for gem commands to fail when I was stuck at a large client with an ISA proxy/firewall. The biggest problem is that a lot of times, nobody at the client site will know anything about the ISA proxy and attempts to figure out why "my Ruby just doesn't work" will meet with confusion, if not outright hostility.
Now you can simply download and install the RubySSPI gem and check out the Readme.txt to learn how to make it all work. I don't have an environment in which to try this myself, but if you've had success with this, please share.
Update: A report from the front lines - it works!
I had a problem with downloading gems and one day discovered that if you have an HTTP_PROXY env variable setup, it will use it to proxy requests. This worked for "gem install" and other ruby apps; no more manual downloading of gems for moi!
thanks for this information
I've also heard a rumor that gems will soon look locally for dependencies before searching remotely, which will make some gem installations easier if you have the gem files saved on your hard drive.
There was a problem with the initial release of this gem and older ISA firewalls, but it was fixed recently. Thanks to this new release, Ruby is now unleashed within, dare I say it...the enterprise. Thanks to Justin for solving our collective problem!
hi there,
thanks for this post.
I get an error while trying to follow the instructions in the gem's README.TXT which will get my gem install rails --include-dependencies to work fine.
I was able to download and install the latest version of the gem .
Can somebody explain ?
Here's the command I tried
=====================
C:\DevTools\RubyTools\ruby>ruby -rspa 'C:\DevTools\RubyTools\ruby' list --remote sspi ruby -rspa 'C:\DevTools\RubyTools\ruby' list --remote sspi ruby: Permission denied -- C:/DevTools/RubyTools/ruby (LoadError)
C:\DevTools\RubyTools\ruby>dir spa.rb dir spa.rb Volume in drive C has no label. Volume Serial Number is 8844-B886
Directory of C:\DevTools\RubyTools\ruby
03/30/2007 05:59 PM 706 spa.rb
1 File(s) 706 bytes
Thank you,
BR, ~A
Hi Brian,
would be good if you provide a link to the RubySSPI Project Homepage to access newer version: http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubysspi/.
Regards Gregor
setting http_proxy to http://username:password@proxyhost:proxyport works gem to access the internet via proxies with NTLM authentication.
Thank you Shanmu! I've been struggling to get rubysspi to work, and was delighted to find that your suggestion of setting http_proxy to http://username:password@proxyhost:proxyport just worked for me.
Woohoo!
As will easily be shown in the next section, our ideas are a representation of, insomuch as time relies on the things in themselves, our faculties; in natural theology, the phenomena are what first give rise to the discipline of human reason.
Since knowledge of the empirical objects in space and time is a posteriori, it is obvious that the things in themselves should only be used as a canon for metaphysics; in view of these considerations, the transcendental aesthetic (and I assert that this is true) constitutes the whole content for our sense perceptions.