Meet MSYS and the DevKit

Sometimes you just want RubyGems to build that cool native, C-based extension without squawking. Who’s your buddy? The DevKit that’s who!

MSYS2-DevKit (only Ruby >= 2.4)

Stating with RubyInstaller-2.4 we’re no longer using our own DevKit compilation, but make use of MSYS2 for both building Ruby itself as well as building Ruby gems with C-extensions. It can be installed through the ridk install command, which is part of RubyInstaller-2.4. Alternatively a manual download and installation from MSYS2 is also possible.

Dedicated DevKit (only Ruby < 2.4)

The RubyInstaller Development Kit is a toolkit that makes it easy to build and use native C/C++ extensions such as RDiscount and Nokogiri for Ruby on Windows. It is built on MSYS1, which is no longer maintained now. So you should upgrade to RubyInstaller-2.4 which makes use of MSYS2.

Simply download, double-click, choose an installation directory and run the Ruby install helper script and you’re ready to start using native Ruby extensions. For installation details check out the Development Kit wiki page.