Run gem install behind a firewall in Windows

I’m contracting at a client running a Novell network and wanted to create some small little ruby scripts to automate some tasks for me. But I ran into problems using gem install behind their firewall. I’m getting the following error:

ERROR: While executing gem … (Gem::RemoteSourceException)
HTTP Response 407

Here is the steps I followed to get gem install working on my windows xp machine in painstaking detail:

Firstly we need to set the HTTP_PROXY environment variable. I’ve played around with different options, using uid and pwd and other suggestions, but all I needed was the following:

1. On the desktop right click the ‘My Computer’ icon and select properties.
2. Click on the advanced tab and then the ‘Environment Variables’ button.
   
3. Now you can either add the HTTP_PROXY variable to the ‘User’ or the ‘System’ variables by clicking the ‘New’ button.
   
4. Within the new system variable dialog, specify ‘HTTP_PROXY’ as the variable name and in the value area a url in the following format – http://[proxy_ip]:[proxy_port] – i.e. http://127.168.1.3:5865
   

Next we install the Ruby Win32 SSPI which gives ruby the ability to authenticate with ISA natively. We need this library because as far as I understand, it patches the Open-uri library because of some incompatibilities with windows. Anyways, follow the following steps to get it working:

1. Download rubysspi from the Ruby Win32 SSPI project page(also available as gem install rubysspi but that doesn’t help much, does it?)
2. Install the gem locally using the following command: gem install [local_path_to_gem]\rubysspi-1.2.3.gem i.e. C:\gems\rubysspi-1.2.3.gem
3. Now copy the spa.rb file from the gem install directory and paste it in the site-ruby directory. i.e. If ruby is installed in C:\ruby, then the paths should be:
   • origin path – C:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\rubysspi-1.2.3\spa.rb
   • destination path – C:\ruby\lib\ruby\site_ruby\spa.rb
4. Find gem.bat in your ruby bin directory (C:\ruby\bin) and replace the last line (i.e. “%~d0%~p0ruby” -x “%~f0″ %*) with the following line – @”ruby” -rspa “c:\ruby\bin\gem” %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9
5. Test you can access the remote ruby gems by executing the following command: gem list rails -r
   
6. You should see similar output as shown above.

Now we can work again without any issues when trying to install or update gems.

Enjoy!!!

Technorati Tags: Ruby, Rails, XP