How do I install rails on a Windows machine that uses a proxy server to get to the internet?

Question

I\'m a big fan of the ruby way. However today it got in my way.

The defacto way of installing rails (i\'m running as a domain user on a WinXP machine) is

• d

Answer 1

Well another battle ends.. with a victory. Turns out the proxy server can be specified after all. However the documented -p and --http-proxy command line switches don't work for some reason or I wasn't smart enough to figure out the right incantation.

>ruby -v
ruby 1.8.6 (2008-08-11 patchlevel 287) [i386-mswin32]
>gem -v
1.3.5 
>gem query -p http
ERROR:  While executing gem ... (OptionParser::InvalidArgument)
    invalid argument: -p http

Just for trying everything I could I tried setting the HTTP_PROXY environment variable on the windows command line as mentioned in the WolfByte's answer to this SO question (that i stumbled upon after search keyword bingo on google). AND IT WORKED!!!

>SET HTTP_PROXY=http://username:password@proxy:port
>gem update --system
>gem install rails

Guess SO needs a new tag-line "The answer is in there" ala XFiles. You just need to wrestle with Google to get to it. Hope this helps the next person