# HOME env variable required

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/home-env-variable-required/141689>\
**Category:** IronRuby\
**Created:** [June 29, 2008, 1:35pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/home-env-variable-required/141689 "2008-06-29T13:35:48Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![editkid](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/977dab/32.png) [@editkid](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/editkid)\
**Post date:** [June 29, 2008, 1:35pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/home-env-variable-required/141689/1 "2008-06-29T13:35:48Z")

</div>

I checked out r116 from SVN into a new clean folder. This is what I  
got:

D:\dev\ruby\ironruby\head\>rake compile

(in D:/dev/ruby/ironruby/head)

rake aborted!

private method `gsub’ called for nil:NilClass

D:/dev/ruby/ironruby/head/rakefile:15

(See full trace by running task with --trace)

Taking a look at the rakefile,

SPEC\_HOME = ENV[‘HOME’].gsub(’\’, ‘/’) + ‘/dev’

So the problem is that I don’t have a HOME variable set. Am I unusual  
in  
this respect? Do most people have this set on their Windows machines by  
default?

Cheers,

Pete

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![editkid](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/977dab/32.png) [@editkid](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/editkid)\
**Post date:** [June 29, 2008, 5:58pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/home-env-variable-required/141689/2 "2008-06-29T17:58:15Z")

</div>

%HOME% is not reliably set. Some OSes will make it a combination of  
%HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%, but many don’t (it’s not set on my Vista x64 box,  
for  
example).

A much more reliable environment variable seems to be %USERPROFILE%.

On Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 4:34 AM, Peter Bacon D. \<