installing rails fails, “failed to build gem native extension”

Question

I just installed ruby and gem on windows 10 x64, I checked that they were both installed. when I tried to install rails, it fails after a while.

see the link below for used commands

El Administrator: Windows PowerShell 

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> ruby -v 
ruby 2.4.3p205 (2017-12-14 revision 61247) (x64-mingw32] 
PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> gem --version 2.6.14 PS 
C:\WINDOWS\system32> gem install rails 
Temporarily enhancing PATH for MSYS/MINGW... 
Building native extensions. This could take a while... 
ERROR: Error installing rails: 
       ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

    current directory: CuRuby24-x64/lib/ruby/gems/2.4.0/gems/nio4r-2.2.0/ext/nio4r 
C:/Ruby24-x64/bin/ruby.exe -r asiteconf20180211-14528-1um1rd2.rb extconf.rb 

current directory: C:/Ruby24-x64/lib/ruby/gems/2.4.0/gems/nio4r-2.2.0/ext/nio4r 
make "DESTDIR=" clean 
'make' is not recognized as an internal or external command, 
operable program or batch file. 

current directory: C:/Ruby24-x64/lib/ruby/gems/2.4.0/gems/nio4r-2.2.0/ext/nio4r 
make "DESTDIR=" 
'make' is not recognized as an internal or external command, 
operable program or batch file. 

make failed, exit code 1 

Gem files will remain installed in C:/Ruby24-x64/lib/ruby/gems/2.4.0/gems/nio4r-2.2.0 for inspection. 
Results logged to C:/Ruby24-x64/lib/ruby/gems/2.4.0/extensions/x64-mingw32/2.4.0/nio4r-2.2.0/gem_make.out 
PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> 

Answer 1

I fixed this issue by using wsl. The installation process is explained here . I also had to use this to enable wsl on windows 10 build 16299.192(settings > system > about). also after i installed everything I ran sudo apt-get install nodejs and gem install rails . After this, I could run the demo( wsl> rails new demo , wsl> cd demo , wsl> rails server ).

Answer 2

You need the build tools to build native extensions.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential

Credit: How do I fix an error with Ruby Gems Installer on WSL?