A guide to building the Shoes ruby toolkit in win32 with MinGW

Thanks to Luis Lavena's rubyinstaller scripts it is very easy to set up a complete dev environment using mingw and msys in windows.

Install the One Click Ruby Installer

The one-click installer installs ruby and rake on your system. It is needed in order to run the rubyinstaller scripts, but it will not be used to build or to run shoes. The latest version of the one click installer can be found here: http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubyinstaller/

Install msysgit

msysgit is the windows distribution of the git source control manager.It can be cowloaded here:
http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/
Be sure to select the option "Run Git from the Windows Command Prompt". The rubyinstaller scripts will invoke git from the command prompt to download shoes:

Fetch the ender672 rubyinstaller branch

Launch "Git Gui" from your start menu and click "Clone Existing Repository". In the clone screen, enter:
Source Location: git://github.com/ender672/rubyinstaller
Target Directory: c:/rubyinstaller

The next instructions will be run from the standard windows command shell.

Run rakefile to get mingw, msys, dependencies & ruby 1.9

In the command shell cd to c:\rubyinstaller, and run rake. This can take quite a while, since it will download all of the requirements to compile shoes, and it will compile the 1.9.1 version of the ruby interpreter.

The script will install the mingw compile tools, the msys unix-like environment, Lots of required libraries, including pango & cairo, and ruby 1.9.1. You will find these in the following locations:
    * Ruby 1.9.1 sources - c:\rubyinstaller\sandbox\ruby_1_9
    * MinGW - c:\rubyinstaller\sandbox\mingw
    * MSYS - c:\rubyinstaller\sandbox\msys

Get the latest ender672 shoes branch

In the command shell cd to c:\rubyinstaller and run rake interpreter:shoes:checkout. This will fetch the latest ender672 branch of shoes from git to c:\rubyinstaller\sandbox\shoes. Whenever you want to fetch the latest version of shoes, you can re-run this rake task.

Compile shoes

In the command shell, cd to c:\rubyinstaller and run rake interpreter:shoes:compile. This will compile shoes and places binaries in c:\rubyinstaller\sandbox\shoes\dist. Whenever you want to recompile shoes, you can re-run this rake task.

Create desktop shortcuts

Create the following desktop shortcuts:
    * Shoes - c:\rubyinstaller\sandbox\shoes\dist\shoes-bin.exe
    * msys - c:\rubyinstaller\sandbox\msys\msys.bat

Enjoy tankspank with mingw & ruby 1.9