# Console broken **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [November 7, 2006, 5:50pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/console-broken/75126 "2006-11-07T17:50:19Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![wickie](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/w/ba9def/32.png) [@wickie](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/wickie)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2006, 5:50pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/console-broken/75126/1 "2006-11-07T17:50:19Z")
I just had to do a reinstall, and somehow something is missing. When I try to run ruby script/console, I get the error message in `require’: no such file to load – readline Obviously, I left something out, but I’m not sure what or where to start trying to get it fixed. I know there are a lot of ruby experts here. Could some of you point me in the right direction. As always, thanks in advance —Michael ---
**Author:** ![wickie](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/w/ba9def/32.png) [@wickie](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/wickie)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2006, 6:17pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/console-broken/75126/2 "2006-11-07T18:17:00Z")
Sounds like you don’t have the readline library or ruby bindings. First make sure you have the readline library itself (by whatever means is most appropriate for your platform), and then build & install the ruby bindings for that (assuming you have the source for ruby handing it’s in ext/readline) Fred ---
**Author:** ![wickie](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/w/ba9def/32.png) [@wickie](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/wickie)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2006, 9:29pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/console-broken/75126/3 "2006-11-07T21:29:38Z")
Frederick C. wrote: > Sounds like you don’t have the readline library or ruby bindings. > First make sure you have the readline library itself (by whatever means > is most appropriate for your platform), and then build & install the > ruby bindings for that (assuming you have the source for ruby handing > it’s in ext/readline) If I write a small program (x = readline; puts x), readline works. Is there something else I need? ---
**Author:** ![wickie](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/w/ba9def/32.png) [@wickie](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/wickie)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2006, 11:33pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/console-broken/75126/4 "2006-11-07T23:33:35Z")
I had the exact same problem on a fresh install of Ubuntu. As Fred mentioned, the readline libs are missing by default. I stumbled for a while and got lucky with google… went something like this but I can’t remember the exact steps… 1. apt-get install build\_essential 2. apt-get install libncurses5-dev libreadline5-dev 3. download ruby 1.8.5 source, 4. edit the ext/setup file to statically import all libs that don’t sound like microsoft ones (this step may not be needed but I did it anyway) 5. run: configure, make, make install 6. download gems source from rubyforge 7. ruby setup.rb 8. gem install rails Getting the debian/ubuntu mysql bindings to work with ruby was another story entirely! ☹ hope this helps ilan Michael S. wrote: > I just had to do a reinstall, and somehow something is missing. When I > try to run ruby script/console, I get the error message > in `require’: no such file to load – readline > > Obviously, I left something out, but I’m not sure what or where to start > trying to get it fixed. > > I know there are a lot of ruby experts here. Could some of you point me > in the right direction. > > As always, thanks in advance > —Michael ---
**Author:** ![wickie](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/w/ba9def/32.png) [@wickie](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/wickie)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2006, 10:08pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/console-broken/75126/5 "2006-11-07T22:08:42Z")
Slightly confusingly, there’s a difference between the IO#readline method, which reads a line from an input device, and the readline library which handles stuff like editing a command line, command history etc… You’re lacking the latter (given that require ‘readline’ fails). When this happened to me the other day it was because I didn’t have all the headers and so on for libreadline at the point where I built ruby. You should be able to get libreadline and associated headers, and then rebuild the ruby bindings for libreadline Fred ---
**Author:** ![wickie](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/w/ba9def/32.png) [@wickie](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/wickie)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2006, 2:40pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/console-broken/75126/6 "2006-11-08T14:40:45Z")
Ilan B. wrote: > Getting the debian/ubuntu mysql bindings to work with ruby was another > story entirely! ☹ > > hope this helps It did - Thanks. What problem are you having with mysql? I did a “gem install mysql” and it came up fine.