I admit that the title would be cooler if this were “1 year on” but I couldn’t wait. Sorry.

Back in January I wrote a post about installing Ruby 1.9.1 on my Mac OS X box and the issues associated with it. The “end goal” was to get rboard running on it under passenger. This was painful back in January! It’s so much easier now!

Unfortunately, there’s still this bug which effects you if you’re on Passenger and 1.9.1. There’s a patch for one of the answers there and that’ll get your application working, but I’m of the belief that you should not ever have to patch a gem and especially the Ruby source.

I want to know: Have you tried running your app on 1.9? Have you encountered any showstoppers?

Quite a lot has changed since January and I’ve decided instead of updating that post, I’m going to go through the entire process again. This is because I would like to show how far Ruby has come during the time since I have written and updated that post and that running your application on Ruby 1.9.1 isn’t as much hassle as people make it out to be.

This time I will be installing it all on an Ubuntu box, since that’s more than likely the location where you’re going to be deploying your app’s code to. I’ll be using Ruby 1.9.1p243 and Rails 2.3.5.

For those of you who don’t like long blog posts here’s the script if you want to install everything without reading through the cruft. Running this script or bash -c “`wget -O – frozenplague.net/boris`” on your server will install the bare-basics:

• git (latest version)
• apache 2
• mysql 5
• ruby 1.9.1
• rails (latest gem version)
• passenger (latest gem version)

Then you’ll be able to setup your Rails app. I can’t do that for you, sorry. My scripting-fu is not that good.

Thanks to Ben Hoskings for the inspiration for this script.

The Long Road

To install Ruby 1.9.1 from source on a base Ubuntu system there’s a couple of pre-requisites. Let’s cover why they’re required.

build-essential

Includes stuff that is, well, essential to building things, like Ruby and the other dependencies.

libssl-dev

Needed for when we go to install Passenger. If not installed you’ll get no such file to load -- openssl because Ruby didn’t install openssl because this dependency was not installed. Fun times were had.

libreadline-dev

Needed for launching script/console. It’ll complain no such file to load -- readline when trying to launch it.

zlib

When you go to sudo gem install rails you’ll get no such file to load -- zlib. This error message is not helpful but it means you need zlib1g installed: sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev

Now you’ll be able to download and install ruby:

mkdir ruby
cd ruby
wget --progress=bar ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.1-p243.tar.gz -O - | tar -zxf - --strip-components 1
./configure
make
echo "Need your password to install Ruby:"
sudo make install

And then finally your gems:

cd ~
sudo rm -rf ruby
sudo gem install mysql passenger rails
sudo passenger-install-apache2-module

I needed to patch Ruby + Passenger with this patch, as when I went to log in to rboard it gave me the error at the top of that page.

Other than that, all of this works perfectly fine on my bare-bones Ubuntu box. I was even able to get rboard running on this setup!

So again: Have you tried running your app on 1.9? Have you encountered any showstoppers? Really keen to hear your stories!

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 5th, 2009 at 6:06 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.