Jul 2006 22

All-in-one installation for Windows

For those of you on Windows who have been struggling with getting Tracks installed, Jim Strupp has kindly packaged up an installation of Tracks which uses Uniform Server. Everything you need (except Ruby) is included, and it’s a simple double click on a batch file to start Tracks running. Give it a go! And many thanks to Jim for creating and hosting the package.

Updated 29-09-2006: Fixed the link to the installation.

39 Comments

Will, Mike & Others:  Thank you for seeking this out. My apologies for the broken link.  This happened about a year ago too.  Since there have been new releases of both Tracks and Uniform Server, I need to re-assemble the package and make sure it works properly before re-posting.  That will take a couple days.  I will email bsag and update the article link when this is done.  Sorry again, and thanks for your patience.

Jim

Thank you for putting in the effort to provide us with this!!! Much appreciation.

Will

I’m intresting too.

A new all-in-one would be just awesome. I just gave up the “manual” way after some error messages no other thread could solve.

Actually a more user friendly easy-to-install version of track would help more ppl to use tracks. (could even charge a few bucks)

When I follow the Windows all-in-one installation package for Tracks I find Testtool.cab [not sure whether two t’s or one in centre]. I get no TracksStart.bat.

So what is so easy about this?

I have been using computers since Windows 3.0
-Charles
charles@cpedley.com

I see only testtool.cab which does nothing.
charles@cpedley.com

I must humbly apologize for not keeping others up to date on this installation.  I am not supporting in anymore.  The main reason is that the 4shared hosting was not reliable for me, and I am not really using Tracks often anymore.  Please see other portions of the site for my and John’s previous instructions about how to get Tracks running on Uniform Server. Also check the forum, and the very helpful comments of others in this article.

Tracks and Uniform Server are both terrific products.  I urge you to delve into them. If I do package up a Windows install for 1.5, I will host it somewhere I like and let you know.  But for now, its not on my immediate roadmap. 

Again, my apologies for letting this hang out there.  —Jim

oh dear - sorry to hear that you aren’t able to keep up the good work, Jim.

Users will be (delighted - sort of) to know that following a rebuild of my site, and the trashing of all previous content, including the tracks videos and howtos, I will take up the mantle and publish a guide on how to get it all installed on windows, using the latest Uniform Server and Tracks.

I’ve got a couple other projects in the works at the moment, so things may take a while to get going, but hopefully expect to see something in a week or two.

I’ll post an update here and ask BSAG to update her links too.

cheers
John

Well, thank you John. My goal would be to get it all zipped up into one big Uniform-Server-with-Tracks-Already-On-It package for download, along with the Ruby file needed to run it.  Just place it in your Windows directory, install Rubym and you have a plain vanilla Tracks instance already within U/S. 

If I get something put together, I will forward it to you for hosting, if you like. Again, this will take me time too, if I can make it work.

Thanks Jim - feel free to let me know what you have put together and i’m more than happy to host it for you. I’ve got a few ideas in the pipeline for a full installer for tracks on windows, including ruby, and i’m going to start doing some tests this week.

Not to denigrate the huge amount of hard work that both John and Jim have put into the tricky problem of getting Tracks running on Windows, but there is now also the BitNami Tracks Stack. This is a single, complete installer for Tracks which works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, and includes everything you need to run Tracks with MySQL. The only thing you can’t currently do with it is use SQLite3 as a db.

There’s nothing wrong at all with having multiple ways of installing Tracks available, but in in the interests of avoiding unecessary duplication of effort, can I encourage Windows users (including John and Jim if you get the time) to check it out and see if it fits your needs?

I’ve tried it with Mac OS X, but don’t have the resources to test on Windows (or Linux). It’s a fairly hefty install currently (though they are working on getting the size down), and it currently includes 1.5RC1 rather than the final release. I’ve contacted them about the final release, and hope that it will be updated soon.

OH! duh! smile

excellent - I’ll look into it today and publish my results - it looks like this has saved me a lot of unnecessary work!
Cheers
John

Work is a bit slow today so i’ve gone ahead and installed it - it works like a dream. The installer is large, true, but it’s smaller than the instant rails installer I was going to use anyway and the ease of installation makes life a lot simpler - merely run the installer, enter required MySQL database username and password, and then let it install.
Once it’s finished, you can let it start up for you or merely go to the program menu, select ‘start bitnami tracks stack service’ and go to the localhost page in your favourite browser! It’s that simple!

This is the default way of installing tracks in windows from now on - I’d suggest that you recommend using this method as it’s painless. I certainly won’t be duplicating my efforts when this installer is so easy to use.

P.S. it looks better in safari on windows than firefox…

Thanks. This is actually a great relief to me. I am glad there is a stable easy way to get Tracks running on Windows, which is what I was trying (semi-successfully) to do when I mimicked Johns instructions to roll it all up.

Have at it people. I’ll give it a whirl too.

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