Introduction
Ruby is itself written in the C programming language. This means either a binary distribution for users' chosen operating system and hardware platform must be installed, or the Ruby sources must be downloaded and compiled on your target system. While compiling Ruby yourself might be fun, it usually makes more sense to download and install one of the many pre-built Ruby packages rather than attempt to build your own. This blog will cover installing pre-built Ruby packages on each platform.
Installing Ruby on Linux
Several different distributions are available today, and installing the Ruby package built specifically for your chosen Linux flavour makes sense. The best way to do this is to use the standard package manager for that particular Linux.
Ruby on Red Hat Enterprise and Fedora Linux
Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Linux use the YUM installation manager and the Red Hat Package Manager (rpm). The first step is to verify if Ruby is already installed. This can be achieved using the following rpm command. In this example, Ruby is not yet installed:
rpm -q ruby
package ruby is not installed
If Ruby is not installed, it can be installed using the yum update manager. This needs to be performed as root, so the superuser password will be required in the following steps:
su -
yum install ruby
The yum tool will locate the ruby package and any other packages on which Ruby is dependent and prompt you to install the packages:
Downloading Packages:
(1/2): ruby-1.8.1-7.EL4.8 100% | | 156 kB 00:10
(2/2): ruby-libs-1.8.1-7. 100% | | 1.5 MB 01:23
Running Transaction Test
Finished Transaction Test
Transaction Test Succeeded
Running Transaction
Installing: ruby-libs ######################### [1/2]
Installing: ruby ######################### [2/2]
Installed: ruby.i386 0:1.8.1-7.EL4.8
Dependency Installed: ruby-libs.i386 0:1.8.1-7.EL4.8
Complete!
once the installation is complete, you may re-run the rpm command to verify the package is now installed.
Ruby on Ubuntu and Debian Linux
Debian, Ubuntu, and other Debian-derived Linux distributions use the apt-get tool to manage package installation. If you are running Ubuntu Linux and get the following output from the ruby command, you need to install Ruby:
$ ruby
The program 'ruby' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install ruby
-bash: ruby: command not found.
To install ruby, simply run the apt-get command as instructed in the message:
sudo apt-get install ruby.
The apt-get tool will display output listing any other packages required by Ruby (better known as dependencies):
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
libruby1.8 ruby1.8
Suggested packages:
ruby1.8-examples rdoc1.8 ri1.8
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libruby1.8 ruby ruby1.8
0 upgraded, 3 newly installed, 0 to remove and 135 not upgraded.
Need to get 1769kB of archives.
After unpacking 6267kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/N]