Upgrading Ruby on Ubuntu Dapper

November 02, 2007

Ubuntu Dapper will only install ruby as high as 1.8.4 which is not ideal sometimes. To upgrade an existing ruby installation to 1.8.6 do the following.

sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get install libreadline5 libreadline5-dev
wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz
tar -xzf ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.8.6
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --enable-pthread --with-readline-dir=/usr/local
make
sudo make install

Even if you had rubygems you need to install it and all your gems! Again.

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/35283/rubygems-1.1.1.tgz
tar -xzf rubygems-1.1.1.tgz
cd rubygems-1.1.1
sudo ruby setup.rb

Now this is where you need to do a little fix. Openssl will not work out of the box and some application need it so you should just set it up now.

Note: If apt-get libssl-dev complains about a not found run: sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install libopenssl-ruby
sudo apt-get install libssl-dev

cd ~/src/ruby-1.8.6/ext/openssl
ruby extconf.rb
make
sudo make install

And thats it!