Installing Rails (with readline and console support) on Ubuntu LTS
January 27th, 2007Here’s what I had to do to get Ruby on Rails to run on Ubuntu LTS with a functioning console (and irb).
(By the way, Wordpress has kind of borked up the formatting of this post, there’s a plain version at:
It comes down to:
- Random stuff
- Ruby (from source)
- Mysql packages
- Rubygems (from source)
- Rails (from a
gem)
Building on posts by:
Thanks guys.
Preliminaries
Mostly via Ed Howland’s post (I believe termcap-compat, which he lists, is no longer necessary, since libc is up to 6 or uh erm… well I don’t rightly know, but that package wasn’t in the repos and everything seems to work for me without it! ☻).
sudo apt-get install gcc sudo apt-get install build-essential sudo apt-get install bison byacc gperf sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev sudo apt-get install libreadline5 libreadline5-dev sudo apt-get install libncurses5 libncurses5-dev sudo apt-get install libssl-dev Build Ruby
Download the Ruby source:
wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/ruby-1.8.5-p12.tar.gz tar xzf ruby-1.8.5-p12.tar.gz And build it. Make some coffee, this takes a while. ☻
cd ruby-1.8.5-p12 ./configure make sudo make install Not sure why this is necessary (ActionMailer?)
apt-get install postfix You’ll also want Ruby’s documentation stuff:
sudo apt-get install rdoc ri irb Mysql packages
apt-get install mysql-server mysql-common mysql-client libmysqlclient15-dev libmysqlclient15off apt-get install libmysql-ruby1.8 Build Ruby Gems
We’ll be using this to install Rails:
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/11289/rubygems-0.9.0.tgz tar xzf rubygems-0.9.0.tgz cd rubygems-0.9.0 sudo ruby setup.rb Build Rails
Actually the easiest part, I’ve never had trouble with this (knock wood).
sudo gem install rails --include-dependencies sudo gem install mysql Note that the mysql gem is really the DB connector for Ruby; it’s not Mysql itself. (We already did that.)
Afterword
Now that I’ve explained what worked for me, let me explain the problem I had, in case you’re interested or facing the same problem.
When I originally followed the steops in Richard Crowley’s post, everything seemed to install fine and Rails worked great.
But I found that my console wouldn’t work, just like Paul Ingles:
Loading development environment./usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/irb/completion.rb:10:in `require': no such file to load -- readline (LoadError) from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/irb/completion.rb:10 from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/irb/init.rb:252:in `load_modules' from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/irb/init.rb:250:in `load_modules' from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/irb/init.rb:21:in `setup' from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/irb.rb:54:in `start' from /usr/local/bin/irb:13 This means no readline in irb, and no script/console whatsoever, which I gotta have.
So I tried his solution, which consisted of building readline from source, and then building Ruby. I’m not totally positive (though I’m going to find out soon when I rerun this whole process on my laptop), but I think that the steps I’ve described above obviate building readline from source on Ubuntu.
And now this works! \o/
./script/console Leave a comment!
I’d really appreciate comments about this process, especially corrections or simplifications.
I’d also just like to get in touch with other folks running Rails on Ubuntu! Believe it or not not everybody using Rails is on OSX. 
I had the same problem with script/console in kubuntu. I thought that your solution was a bit lengthy. So, after further search I found a couple of links that solved the problem in a simpler manner. Check them out:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=169891
http://blog.nanorails.com/articles/2006/03/06/installing-readline-on-kubuntu
Steps that worked for me:
1.) Download ruby source.
Download Here
2.) Extract the tar file.
tar -xvf ruby-1.8.5-p12.tar.gz
3.) Change to that directory
cd ruby-1.8.5-p12.tar.gz
4.) Type these commands.
./configure
make
sudo make install
5.) Install readline and ncurses.
apt-get install libncurses5-dev libreadline5-dev
6.) go back to the folder ruby source folder.
ruby-1.8.5-p12.tar.gz
7.) Type these commands
cd ext
cd readline
ruby extconf.rb
make
sudo make install
Thats it. The console bug no longer appears.
- ror-fan @ 6 February 2007Do you have ruby 1.8 installed twice? “apt-get install ri” etc finds that I don’t have ruby 1.8 package installed (because I have installed 1.8.5 from source) and wants to install it.
Currently I have severely borked rails 1.2.2 installation (every attempt to use rails apart from -v gives an error “undefined method `write_inheritable_attribute’”) and I’m trying to figure out what went wrong.
Ruby 1.8.5 in /usr/local seems to be ok. I can install rails/mysql etc gems. This all started when I had an existing ruby 1.8.4 and 1.2.1 rails installation but wanted to upgrade to 1.8.5. Baaaaad move.
- LadyBug @ 14 February 2007Just a side comment on my problem. It seems that while rails/gems/ruby were installed ok, the rails dependencies were somewhat mangled. So, gem uninstall/install activesupport/activerecord/etc helped a lot.
At least webrick runs now, but my application still doesn’t.
- LadyBug @ 14 February 2007Hi peeps,
I am just pasting some notes I have made that may be helpful! The notes are not complete but my offer a clue or two.
————————————————–
How to install a rails stack on Ubuntu Dapper Drake.
# This quick guide makes the following assumptions:
# You are familiar with Ubuntu server and file directories.
# You are aware of creating users and keys.
# You are aware of Linux security measures.
# ‘\’ = part of the previous line (cat).
1. “Uncomment out unviverse packages. etc/apt/sources.list”
# When building Ruby and Rubygems from source, some libraries are needed.
# This is when we use apt-get to install the libraries we need.
2. “apt-get update”
3. “apt-get install build-essential”
4. “apt-get install bison byacc gperf
apt-get install zlib1g-dev
apt-get install libreadline5 libreadline5-dev
apt-get install libncurses5 libncurses5-dev
apt-get install libssl-dev”
# Alternatively step 4 may be combined, as below:
“apt-get install bison byacc gperf zlib1g-dev libreadline5 \
libreadline5-dev libncurses5 libncurses5-dev libssl-dev”
5. “wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz”
“tar xzvf ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz”
“cd ruby-1.8.6″
“./configure && make && make install”
6. “wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/17190/rubygems-0.9.2.tgz”
“tar xzvf rubygems-0.9.2.tgz”
“cd rubygems-0.9.2″
“ruby.set.rb”
7. “rm -rf ruby*”
# We do not include Rails rdoc. This saves production system resources.
8. “sudo gem install rails –include-dependencies –no-rdoc –no-ri”
# Now we install MySql
9. “apt-get install mysql-server-5.0 mysql-client-5.0 \
libmysqlclient15-dev libmysqlclient15off zlib1g-dev libmysql-ruby1.8″
# Install the mysql/Ruby binding
“sudo gem install mysql”
# make sure you have irb ‘require’ rubygems. The easy way (so far) is
# create a file ‘.irbrc’ in /etc/.irbrc
“nano .irbrc”
# In your .irbrc file put the following –
- MichaelT @ 22 September 2007“require ‘rubygems”