Resque on Windows

Recently I've been working on integrating Resque as a background task processor into our platform.

Unfortunately, my team's development platform is Windows, which doesn't always play nicely with cutting edge web or Ruby tools. Using http://rubyinstaller.org and Dave Hoover's "Do YOU know Resque?", I was able to get Resque working quite easily. BUT, Resque-web would not run. I kept ending up with a Vegas error saying

gem_original_require' no such file to load win32/process

and the first few hours of Googling gave me no results.

Being somewhat new to Ruby, it wasn't immediately obvious what the problem was. I assumed that when I installed the Resque gem, all possible dependencies would come along with it. Turns out that wasn't the case.

On Windows, Vegas^1^ has a dependency on a gem called win32-process that wasn't automatically installed. If I was more familiar with Ruby stacktraces I (hopefully) would have seen that Ruby was telling me exactly what it needed. I had to install the dependency. Manually installing win32-process got me a huge step closer to running Resque-web:

C:\>gem install win32-process

After that, I faced a missing HOME error, so I set that environment variable like this:

C:\>set HOME=C:\Users\username

Also, several blogs and issue reports suggest running Resque-web with -F on windows to restrict forking.

And finally, in order to properly set my redis namespace, I had to include it in the connection string, not as a paramter to -n.

C:\path\to\demo>resque-web -p 8282 -r server.domain.name:redis-port/Resque-namespace -F -L

After all of this, I was able to successfully fire up resque-web on Windows and move forward with developing our solution.

1. For those unfamiliar with Resque, Vegas is a wrapper around sinatra that Resque uses to serve Resque-web - the built-in web admin console for Resque.