Upgrading Hardy to Ruby 1.8.7 Enterprise Edition
Apr 17 2010 - By George Webster
The apt packages for ubuntu hardy heron 8.04 leave ruby stuck back in 1.8.6 land. While for many things this might be fine, given the security improvements, plus the added appeal of ruby enterprise addition's speed enhancements I decided to make the jump.
While the folks at phusion offer a .deb package for ubuntu 8.04 I ran into a few problems with it so I choose to grab the tar file and build it all myself.
tar xzvf ruby-enterprise-X.X.X.tar.gz sudo ./ruby-enterprise-X.X.X/installer
The installer is well done and provides a list of options. The easiest of which is option 1. making and building ruby enterprise edition. This is done ina location of your choosing. I chose
/opt/ree-1.8.7
For simplicity and the ability it simply remove that one directory to uninstall the whole beast is quite nice.
After much fetching and extracting and compiling... our installer attempts to install many of the commonly used gems for ruby. This worked well with the sold exception of mysql.
I needed to install a hardy development package which the phusion installer package missed in its dependency checks.
sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient15-dev
After that installs:
sudo /opt/ree-1.8.7/bin/ruby /opt/ree-1.8.7/bin/gem install mysql
And the same goes for any other gems you maybe have installed that are missing. As with a standard install you can get a list of everything installed with the list command.
sudo /opt/ree-1.8.7/bin/ruby /opt/ree-1.8.7/bin/gem list
And repeating the process for any other missing gems.
After lots of stuggles with the .deb package, the tar ball installer worked like a charm. I then followed the simple instructions to connect to apache2 and voila, up and running with ruby enterprise edition 1.8.7