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In googling around to find out how to do this I noticed that often people would break readline support when adding openssl support building their local ruby. I also wanted to have control over the version of ruby running on a hosting account I have at pair.com. My host account has ruby 1.8.4 installed on a FreeBSD 4.8-STABLE machine. Some FreeBSD builds of ruby have problems with broken iconv support (needed by the TMail library that is used in parsing email in ActionMailer). The technique I’m about to discuss will show how to deal with that as well.

On pages 35-36 Agile Web Development with Rails section “3.4 Installing on Linux” Dave Thomas also describes building a local copy of ruby in the $HOME directory of accounts he has on Linux. We’ll do that and also build a local gem as well.

First make sure the environment of your shell (in the example here its bash) has $HOME/bin in its path and the system library environment variable set with $HOME/lib . Place these export commands at the end of your $HOME/.bashrc and then source your updated bashrc into the current environment after your changes are saved.

#this is at the end of $HOME/.bashrc

export PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH

export MAN_PATH=$HOME/man

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/lib:/usr/local/lib:/usr/lib

#the gem portion

export PATH=$HOME/gems/bin:$PATH

export GEM_PATH=$HOME/gems

export GEM_HOME=$HOME/gems

Now source your updated .bashrc into your current environment

. ~/.bashrc

Create a directory called builds in your $HOME (or somewhere that you want to do your builds). Change into that directory and download the ruby, iconv, openssl, and readline sources (check for the latest versions when you do this). Then extract each archive.

mkdir $HOME/builds

cd $HOME/builds

wget ftp://ftp.cwru.edu/pub/bash/readline-5.2.tar.gz

wget http://www.openssl.org/source/openssl-0.9.8d.tar.gz

wget http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/libiconv/libiconv-1.11.tar.gz

wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/ruby-1.8.5.tar.gz

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/11289/rubygems-0.9.0.tgz

tar xzf readline-5.2.tar.gz

tar xzf openssl-0.9.8d.tar.gz

tar xzf libiconv-1.11.tar.gz

tar xzf ruby-1.8.5.tar.gz

tar xzf rubygems-0.9.0.tgz

Now build each library, then ruby, we’ll install gem later at the end.

OpenSSL

cd $HOME/builds/openssl-0.9.8d

./config —prefix=$HOME —openssldir=$HOME/openssl shared

make

make test

make install

ReadLine Library

cd $HOME/builds/readline-5.2

./configure —prefix=$HOME

make

make install

Iconv library

cd $HOME/builds/libiconv-1.11

./configure —prefix=$HOME

make

make install

Ruby for Debian and FreeBSD. I think not having libncurses5-dev installed on the host system will affect the build of readline support. If you don’t have libncurses.so in /usr/lib or /usr/local/lib then you’ll have to build it locally (as with the other libraries) and include it as a —with-ncurses-dir=$HOME parameter to configure. If you don’t see libreadline.so in the ldd output (below) then you’ll have install your own local libncurses.so library.

cd $HOME/builds/ruby-1.8.5

./configure —prefix=$HOME —with-static-linked-ext —with-iconv-dir=$HOME —with-openssl-dir=$HOME —with-readline-dir=$HOME

make

make test

make install

As you can see the local version of ruby is installed and is using the local openssl, readline, and iconv libraries.

mike@lab ~/builds/ruby-1.8.5$ which ruby

/home/mike/bin/ruby

mike@lab ~/builds/ruby-1.8.5$ ruby —version

ruby 1.8.5 (2006-08-25) [i686-linux]

mike@lab ~/builds/ruby-1.8.5$ ldd $HOME/bin/ruby

        linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xffffe000)

        libdl.so.2 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libdl.so.2 (0xa7f55000)

        libcrypt.so.1 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libcrypt.so.1 (0xa7f26000)

        libm.so.6 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libm.so.6 (0xa7f01000)

        libreadline.so.5 => /home/mike/lib/libreadline.so.5 (0xa7ed4000)

        libncurses.so.5 => /usr/lib/libncurses.so.5 (0xa7e93000)

        libssl.so.0.9.8 => /home/mike/lib/libssl.so.0.9.8 (0xa7e59000)

        libcrypto.so.0.9.8 => /home/mike/lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.8 (0xa7d30000)

        libiconv.so.2 => /home/mike/lib/libiconv.so.2 (0xa7c51000)

        libutil.so.1 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libutil.so.1 (0xa7c4d000)

        libz.so.1 => /usr/lib/libz.so.1 (0xa7c39000)

        libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6 (0xa7b08000)

        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xa7f72000)

This is how to set up your local gems.

mkdir $HOME/gems

cd $HOME/builds/rubygems-0.9.0

ruby setup.rb all —prefix=$HOME

Make sure its working

mike@lab ~/builds/rubygems-0.9.0$ gem environment

Rubygems Environment:

  – VERSION: 0.9.0 (0.9.0)

  – INSTALLATION DIRECTORY: /home/mike/gems

  – GEM PATH:

     – /home/mike/gems

  – REMOTE SOURCES:

     – http://gems.rubyforge.org

mike@lab ~/builds/rubygems-0.9.0$ gem list —local


		

			
LOCAL GEMS *
		
sources (0.0.1)

    This package provides download sources for remote gem installation

Install rails and the rails command will be in your path as $HOME/gems/bin/rails. The include dependencies flag will cause rails, rake, activesupport, activerecord, actionpack, actionmailer, and actionwebservice to be installed.

gem install --remote --rdoc --ri --include-dependencies rails
gem list --local

Run gem_server to view your freshly minted documentation.