JRuby Gem install IO Error on Windows 7 0

Posted by admin
on Tuesday, April 13

Oh, I love being back in Windows land. Trying to get JRuby 1.4 working under Windows 7, I got this error when trying to install gems:

ERROR:  While executing gem ... (IOError)
  Access is denied

Seems that the JRuby installer sets permissions on the installed files that prevents the logged in user from modifying anything.

To get around this I set the permissions on the gems folder to allow the interactive user to make changes, basically giving full read-write access to local users. The location may vary on your box, but on mine it was here:

C:\Program Files\jruby-1.4.0\lib\ruby\gems

Some gems want to create links in the JRuby \bin file (Rails is an example). This requires setting more permissions, in my case here: 

C:\Program Files\jruby-1.4.0\bin

And just to be safe I did the same thing for \docs:

C:\Program Files\jruby-1.4.0\docs

Now Rails and other gems install without any hassle. I still want my bash shell back..