[HOW TO] install ruby, rubygems, and railsfrom source

[siraf]

some of the packages in Ubuntu for ruby are screwed up (to put it lightly):

/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/remote_fetcher.rb:4:in `require': no such file to load — zlib (LoadError)

So i've written a guide on how to install ruby from scratch

open a terminal

First, download the required pacakges:

wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/20989/rubygems-0.9.4.tgz

next, extract the packages to their directories and copy them to /usr/local/src/

sudo cp -r ~/ruby-1.8.6 /usr/local/src/
sudo cp -r ~/rubygems-0.9.4 /usr/local/src/

okay, here's the tricky part, we're going to configure ruby and use zlib, but first we have to install it:

sudo apt-get install zlib*
cd /usr/local/src/ruby-1.8.6/ext/zlib/

As root:

ruby extconf.rb --with-zlib-include=/usr/include --with-zlib-lib=/usr/lib
make
make install

Now it's time for rubygems, we're doing this in parts.
Once again, as root:

cd /usr/local/src/rubygems-0.9.4/
ruby setup.rb config
ruby setup.rb setup
ruby setup.rb install

Finally we're going to use gems to install rails (or whatever other gems), it's best to start in the home directory for this.

cd
sudo gem install rails --with-dependencies

I personally had to repeat that last command, but YMMV

I really hope this helps.

[Druke]

Great howto! my only problem was that in order to run the scripts in rubysrcdir/ext/zlib you need to have ruby already installed, so i just installed from the src dir then did the ruby scripts in ext/zlib.