I loaded the latest Bitnami Ruby Stack (RubyStack 1.5-2) on my personal Windows-XP development machine this morning. I say loaded, because there is very little configuration that needs to be done.  The bonus (for me) is that I get Ruby 1.8.7 and Ruby 1.9.1 plus a complete Ruby on Rails environment and upgrades for many other packages in the full stack. This is my first time running Ruby 1.9, so I look forward to trying that out.  It’s a hefty package to download and install (225MB), but the Bitnami/Bitrock installer makes configuring your Ruby on Rails development (or test) environment as easy as riding a bike, or falling off a log.  Just hop on and ride — or fall off and roll (depending on your favorite metaphor).

Here’s a listing of the major components that are included in this FOSS (Free Open Source Software) stack.

• Ruby 1.8.7
• Ruby 1.9.1
• RubyGems 1.3.4
• Rails 2.3.2
• ImageMagick 6.5.2-9
• Subversion 1.6.2
• SQLite 3.5.1
• MySQL 5.1.30
• Apache 2.2.11
• PHP 5.2.8
• phpMyAdmin 2.11.9.4
• Git 1.6.3.1
• Nginx 0.7.59

Lot’s of great choices and options make this “a very powerfull stack.”  Bitnami’s latest RubyStack (RubyStack 1.5-2) goes above and beyond to give you a full Ruby environment (for the two latest stable releases of Ruby), a PHP environment, two SQL database servers, two web servers, and two version control services. Wow! All that, and it only takes a few minutes to configure and install.

I’ll be using the Bitnami stack (with Ruby 1.8.7 and Ruby 1.9.1) as a test environment while working on the Ruby and Rails book reviews I mentioned yesterday.