title: Installing native Ruby extensions on Windows for Jekyll
body: <p>I'm about to go crazy here so I'll just ask:</p>
  
  <p>How the hell do you install the Ruby Gem Jekyll on Windows.</p>
  
  <p>Jekyll depends on fast-stemmer-1.0.0 and that has to be built as a native extension</p>
  
  <p>I found this handy guide on <a href="http://github.com/oneclick/rubyinstaller/wiki/development-kit" rel="noreferrer">RubyDevKit</a> to install a 'sane' environment on Windows and it works, but fast-stemmer is still hell bent on using nmake to build the binaries and that returns the following error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC&gt;gem install jekyll
  Temporarily enhancing PATH to include DevKit...
  Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
  ERROR:  Error installing jekyll:
          ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
  
  C:/Ruby/bin/ruby.exe extconf.rb
  creating Makefile
  
  nmake
  
  Microsoft (R) Program Maintenance Utility Version 10.00.30319.01
  Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.
  
          cl -nologo -I. -IC:/Ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/i386-mswin32 -IC:/Ruby/lib/ruby/1.
  8/i386-mswin32 -I. -MD -Zi -O2b2xg- -G6  -c -Tcporter.c
  cl : Command line warning D9035 : option 'Og-' has been deprecated and will be r
  emoved in a future release
  cl : Command line warning D9002 : ignoring unknown option '-G6'
  porter.c
  porter.c(31) : fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'stdlib.h': No such
  file or directory
  NMAKE : fatal error U1077: '"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0
  \VC\BIN\cl.EXE"' : return code '0x2'
  Stop.
  
  
  Gem files will remain installed in C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/fast-stemmer-1
  .0.0 for inspection.
  Results logged to C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/fast-stemmer-1.0.0/ext/gem_make
  .out
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I'm using the nmake that came with Visual Studio 2010 in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\bin as suggested in some other Article. But it still doesn't work.</p>
  
  <p>I've tried running the gem install from the MSYS shell that comes with the DevKit so I do have the Unix make at that point, but I don't know how to instruct Ruby to use make instead of nmake (and reading the mkmf.rb didn't enlighten me either). It's hell bent on using nmake and that fails pretty with the above error message</p>
  
  <p>Any help on this would be greatly appreciated!</p>
  
  <p><strong>Update</strong>
  I finally realized that I had not installed Ruby through RubyInstaller.org. I reinstalled using the Installer and now building jekyll with the DevKit works fine. </p>
  
  <p>Thanks to everyone for pointing that out!</p>