· ruby

Installing Ruby 1.9.2 with RVM on Snow Leopard

Yesterday evening I decided to try and upgrade the Ruby installation on my Mac from 1.8.7 to 1.9.2 and went on the yak shaving mission which is doing just that.

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RVM seems to be the way to install Ruby these days so I started off by installing that with the following command from the terminal:

bash < <( curl http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/releases/rvm-install-head )

That bit worked fine for me but there are further instructions on the RVM website if that doesn’t work.

My colleague David Santoro pointed me to a post on ASCIIcasts detailing the various steps to follow to get Ruby installed.

Unfortunately my first attempt…​

rvm install 1.9.2

…​resulted in the following error in the log file:

yaml.h is missing. Please install libyaml.
readline.c: In function ‘username_completion_proc_call’:
readline.c:1292: error: ‘username_completion_function’ undeclared (first use in this function)
readline.c:1292: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
readline.c:1292: error: for each function it appears in.)
make[1]: *** [readline.o] Error 1
make: *** [mkmain.sh] Error 1

I thought that perhaps 'libyaml' was the problem but Michael Guterl pointed me to a post on the RVM mailing list which suggests this was a red herring and that the real problem was 'readline'.

That led me back to a post on the RVM website which explains how to install 'readline' and then tell RVM to use that version of readline when installing Ruby.

I tried that and then ran the following command as suggested on Mark Turner’s blog post:

rvm install 1.9.2-head -C --enable-shared,--with-readline-dir=/opt/local,--build=x86_64-apple-darwin10

That resulted in this error:

ld: in /usr/local/lib/libxml2.2.dylib, file was built for i386 which is not the architecture being linked (x86_64)
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[1]: *** [../../.ext/x86_64-darwin10/tcltklib.bundle] Error 1
make: *** [mkmain.sh] Error 1

Michael pointed out that I needed to recompile 'libxml2.2' to run on a 64 bit O/S as I’m running Snow Leopard.

I hadn’t previously used the 'file' function which allows you to see which architecture a file has been compiled for.

e.g.

file /usr/local/lib/libxml2.2.dylib

/usr/local/lib/libxml2.2.dylib: Mach-O dynamically linked shared library i386

I had to recompile 'libxml2.2' to run on a 64 bit O/S which I did by downloading the distribution from the xmlsoft website and then running the following commands:

tar xzvf libxml2-2.7.3.tar.gz
cd libxml2-2.7.3
./configure --with-python=/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.3/
make
sudo make install

Re-running RVM Ruby installation command I then had this error instead:

tcltklib.c:9539: warning: implicit conversion shortens 64-bit value into a 32-bit value
ld: in /usr/local/lib/libsqlite3.dylib, file was built for i386 which is not the architecture being linked (x86_64)
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[1]: *** [../../.ext/x86_64-darwin10/tcltklib.bundle] Error 1
make: *** [mkmain.sh] Error 1

I downloaded the sqlite3 distribution and having untarred the file ran the following commands as detailed on this post:

CFLAGS='-arch i686 -arch x86_64' LDFLAGS='-arch i686 -arch x86_64'
./configure --disable-dependency-tracking
make
sudo make install

Next I needed to recompiled 'libxslt' which I downloaded from the xmlsoft website as well before untarring it and running the following:

./configure
make
sudo make install

Having done that I re-ran the RVM Ruby installation command:

rvm install 1.9.2-head -C --enable-shared,--with-readline-dir=/opt/local,--build=x86_64-apple-darwin10

And it finally worked!

The magnificent yak is borrowed under the Creative Commons Licence from LiminalMike’s Flickr Stream.

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