How to install Ruby Installer in Azure Websites

Question

I'm using SASS in my application and i'm in the process of migrating to Azure.

I've got my project setup but it's not compiling the SASS. I'm trying to use the Ruby Installer from here http://rubyinstaller.org/downloads/ (Ruby 1.9.3-p551) and I've uploaded this via FTP to D:/home however when I try to install it simply using the command rubyinstaller-1.9.3-p551.exe it doesn't do anything. No error message or anything either.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

You no longer need to depend on Ruby to compile your SASS.

LIBSASS has 100% parity with RUBY SASS, and doesn't come with the Ruby dependency.

If you're using grunt, you can switch over to LIBSASS by editing your gruntfile.js to use

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-sass');

instead of

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-contrib-sass');

You should also update your package.json file accordingly.

You can then get Azure to execute your grunt tasks as explained in this answer.

Answer 2

Using the installer won't work because it probably requires an interactive session. What I did was get the Ruby binaries and FTP those to the website. You can find the binaries as as 7zip file on Ruby download page. I followed along this post: Installing Ruby 1.8.7 (and other stuff) manually. The part about zlib is probably outdated because there is a corresponding dll in the zipped archive already. I did download the other mentioned dll though (the iconv dll) and placed it in the Ruby bin folder.

Gem is already bundled in the package so no need to install that separately.

Unfortunately now I'm having difficulties in getting the gulp task to work because it is still saying "ruby and compass must be installed and in path". I set the path in the gulpfile.