Installing Rails (with readline and console support) on Ubuntu LTS

Here's what I had to do to get Ruby on Rails to run on Ubuntu LTS with a functioning console (and irb).

It comes down to:

Random packages
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
apt-get 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