How To: Install and Compile Ruby 1.9.3+ from Source with libyaml on CentOS

If you are looking to install Ruby 1.9.3+ on a Linux system this will guide you through compiling the software. There is always the option to use yum to install ruby packages but the versions in repositories will be older, not the latest stable. This guide is using a Centos 5.x base system without any packages installed and all commands run as root.

1. First the system will need the appropriate packages to compile and install the source code for ruby. To do this run the following command.

yum -y install make gcc openssl-devel zlib-devel gcc gcc-c++ make autoconf readline-devel curl-devel expat-devel gettext-devel ncurses-devel sqlite3-devel mysql-devel httpd-devel wget which

2. Now that a compiler package is installed move on to download, compile and install the libyaml library.

cd /usr/src
wget http://pyyaml.org/download/libyaml/yaml-0.1.4.tar.gz
tar zxf yaml-0.1.4.tar.gz
cd yaml-0.1.4
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make && make install

3. The next step is to download, compile and install Ruby 1.9.3.

cd /usr/src
wget http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.3-p0.tar.gz
tar zxf ruby-1.9.3-p0.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.9.3-p0
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --disable-install-doc --with-opt-dir=/usr/local/lib
make && make install

4. Upon completion of steps 1 through 3 ruby is accessible via command line. Test ruby by running the following command.

[root@new-host-2 ~]# ruby -v
ruby 1.9.3p0 (2011-10-30 revision 33570)

The guide will help get Ruby working on a CentOS system, later I will cover what you can do with Ruby.

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