Rails and MongoDB with Cygwin

Setting up Ruby on Rails with MongoDB on a Windows machine.

You need to have cygwin installed with ruby and git packages (obviously you may want to have more).

The following commands are executed in the cygwin prompt:

git clone git://github.com/rubygems/rubygems.git
cd rubygems/
ruby setup.rb
gem install rails

Go to the MongoDB website and download Windows binaries: http://www.mongodb.org/downloads. Extract the content of the bin/ directory to C:\cygwin\usr\local\bin.

Create a directory for the db files (the default MongoDB db files directory is C:\datadb):

cd /cygdrive/c
mkdir data
mkdir data/db

Done! Both mongo and rails are in your cygwin’s path now, feel free to tweak it as you see fit.