# Problems with RubyGems on a Debian machine **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [February 5, 2010, 8:00am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/problems-with-rubygems-on-a-debian-machine/182955 "2010-02-05T08:00:39Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![snow-templar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/977dab/32.png) [@snow-templar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/snow-templar)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2010, 8:00am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/problems-with-rubygems-on-a-debian-machine/182955/1 "2010-02-05T08:00:39Z")
I wasn’t quite sure if I should of posted this in the Ruby forum or the Ruby on Rails forum but here it goes. So I’ve been trying to install rails onto a Debian (Lenny) machine of mine. I assumed from the readings I have done that RubyGems is supposed to take care of dependencies for me, but apparently on my machine it doesn’t. It tries to install rails and then complains that I need a version of Rack 1.0.0 or newer. Now RubyGems will let me install packages that don’t have the tree of dependencies like rails and so Rack and Rake install just fine. But when I go back to installing Rails, it still complains that I do not have rack installed or it is not a new enough of a version. A friend of mine mentioned something about a file the RubyGems uses to handle dependencies that can get messed up if something goes wrong during an installation but I don’t know anything about that. Can anyone help? ---
**Author:** ![snow-templar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/977dab/32.png) [@snow-templar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/snow-templar)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2010, 9:38am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/problems-with-rubygems-on-a-debian-machine/182955/2 "2010-02-05T09:38:12Z")
Just some additional information I found after searching the gem directory. So if I try ‘gem install rails’ the first time, it stops at the normal rack dependency error. When I check the gems installed, it installed activerecord, activesupport, rack, and rake. When I try ‘gem install rails’ again, I get the same error message, but this time I see that actionpack is also installed. However, repeating ‘gem install rails’ past this will not install any additional gems. The exact error message is: ERROR: Error installing rails: actionpack requires rack (~\> 1.0.0, runtime) Again, not sure if this is a Rails specific issue I should just move the to Ruby on Rails forum/mailing list but since this seems to be an error with RubyGems and not Rails, I thought it would be appropriate to post here. Again, any help would be very much appreciated. ---
**Author:** ![snow-templar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/977dab/32.png) [@snow-templar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/snow-templar)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2010, 11:26am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/problems-with-rubygems-on-a-debian-machine/182955/3 "2010-02-05T11:26:59Z")
Greg C. wrote: > still complains that I do not have rack installed or it is not a new > enough of a version. A friend of mine mentioned something about a file > the RubyGems uses to handle dependencies that can get messed up if > something goes wrong during an installation but I don’t know anything > about that. Can anyone help? Do you use debian’s rubygems package? ---
**Author:** ![snow-templar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/977dab/32.png) [@snow-templar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/snow-templar)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2010, 11:26am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/problems-with-rubygems-on-a-debian-machine/182955/4 "2010-02-05T11:26:59Z")
On Feb 5, 9:38 am, Greg C. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > ``` > actionpack requires rack (~> 1.0.0, runtime) > > ``` This issue was discovered and discussed here: [http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/rubygems-developers/2010-January/005141.html](http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/rubygems-developers/2010-January/005141.html) The issue is that there are components that define runtime and development time dependencies. RubyGems up to version 1.3.5 was not capable of resolve that recursive issue. > Again, not sure if this is a Rails specific issue I should just move the > to Ruby on Rails forum/mailing list but since this seems to be an error > with RubyGems and not Rails, I thought it would be appropriate to post > here. Again, any help would be very much appreciated. In the mean time, you can manually install rack and then proceed with the normal gem installation. The fix will be part of next RubyGems release. ---
**Author:** ![snow-templar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/977dab/32.png) [@snow-templar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/snow-templar)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2010, 2:50pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/problems-with-rubygems-on-a-debian-machine/182955/5 "2010-02-05T14:50:17Z")
Luis L. wrote: > On Feb 5, 9:38�am, Greg C. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > > > � � � � actionpack requires rack (~\> 1.0.0, runtime) > > This issue was discovered and discussed here: > > [http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/rubygems-developers/2010-January/005141.html](http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/rubygems-developers/2010-January/005141.html) > > The issue is that there are components that define runtime and > development time dependencies. RubyGems up to version 1.3.5 was not > capable of resolve that recursive issue. > > > Again, not sure if this is a Rails specific issue I should just move the > > to Ruby on Rails forum/mailing list but since this seems to be an error > > with RubyGems and not Rails, I thought it would be appropriate to post > > here. �Again, any help would be very much appreciated. > > In the mean time, you can manually install rack and then proceed with > the normal gem installation. > > The fix will be part of next RubyGems release. Well my problem is mostly that when I do install Rack, it still can’t see it in the dependencies and so cannot proceed to install Rails. Ralf M. wrote: > Greg C. wrote: > > > still complains that I do not have rack installed or it is not a new > > enough of a version. A friend of mine mentioned something about a file > > the RubyGems uses to handle dependencies that can get messed up if > > something goes wrong during an installation but I don’t know anything > > about that. Can anyone help? > > Do you use debian’s rubygems package? Yes I did use debian’s rubygems package, specifically whichever one is hosted on the Rochester Institute of Technology mirror. ---
**Author:** ![snow-templar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/977dab/32.png) [@snow-templar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/snow-templar)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2010, 5:59pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/problems-with-rubygems-on-a-debian-machine/182955/6 "2010-02-10T17:59:15Z")
Known problem. Both Debian apt/aptitude/Synaptic and RubyGems keep track of dependencies. However, they don’t play well together. From [http://blog.phusion.nl](http://blog.phusion.nl) Installing Ruby/Rails software on Debian and Ubuntu Linux distributions has been less than ideal until now. Ruby has a package manager called RubyGems, but Debian-based distributions have their own package manager, namely Apt, which manages the entire system and is preferred by most Debian users. RubyGems does not integrate well with Apt and cannot handle native Debian package dependencies. But on the other hand, Ruby software provided through the current Debian Apt repositories are not always up-to-date, e.g. the latest Rails version is often not available. Issues and attempted solutions include (some apply to all RubyGems, others only if attempting Rails 3): 1. Debian specifically disables gem update --system 2. Use ruby gem rvm to help isolate issues of different ruby environments - including ruby version and gem sets. 3. (ruby 1.9.1) From Luis L.: Try … RubyGems that cames with 1.9.1 instead of the 1.3.5 on top of it. 4. use ruby 1.8.7 (ruby 1.9.1 and 1.9.2 work for some but not all people) 5. Due to a rubygems bug, you must uninstall all older versions of bundler for 0.9 to work 6. So far rails 3.0.0.beta and ruby 1.9.1 are not friends. In order to install rails, you need rubygems 1.3.5, but ruby 1.9.1 has rubygems 1.3.1 bundled. Workaround 1: From Luis L.: Try … RubyGems that cames with 1.9.1 instead of the 1.3.5 on top of it. Workaround 2. is to remove your manually installed rubygems from 1.9.x. Workaround 3. you can gem install --force. Or, convert gems to deb 7. dcu (alpha 2009/10/17) gem2deb - [GitHub - dcu/gem2deb: convert ruby gem to debian package](http://github.com/dcu/gem2deb) 8. thwarted (alpha 2008/12/05) gem2deb - [GitHub - thwarted/gem2deb: Takes a URL to a .gem or tar'ed gem and does the brute force work of converting it to a .deb package](http://github.com/thwarted/gem2deb) 9. Phusion/hongli (beta, Debian etch only!) DebGem - free now, pay later. My suggestions are (for ruby 1.9.x): 1. Uninstall all ruby gems, 2. Revert to RubyGems version 1.3.1 3. Install ruby gem rvm. 4. Use rvm to isolate the issues. > Greg C. wrote: > I wasn’t quite sure if I should of posted this in the Ruby forum or the > Ruby on Rails forum but here it goes. > So I’ve been trying to install rails onto a Debian (Lenny) machine of > mine. I assumed from the readings I have done that RubyGems is supposed > to take care of dependencies for me, but apparently on my machine it > doesn’t. It tries to install rails and then complains that I need a > version of Rack 1.0.0 or newer. Now RubyGems will let me install > packages that don’t have the tree of dependencies like rails and so Rack > and Rake install just fine. But when I go back to installing Rails, it > still complains that I do not have rack installed or it is not a new > enough of a version. A friend of mine mentioned something about a file > the RubyGems uses to handle dependencies that can get messed up if > something goes wrong during an installation but I don’t know anything > about that. Can anyone help? > Yes I did use debian’s rubygems package, specifically whichever one is > hosted on the Rochester Institute of Technology mirror. ---
**Author:** ![snow-templar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/977dab/32.png) [@snow-templar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/snow-templar)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2010, 9:43pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/problems-with-rubygems-on-a-debian-machine/182955/7 "2010-02-10T21:43:42Z")
On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 11:59 AM, Thomas Lucero [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > repositories are not always up-to-date, e.g. the latest Rails version is > often not available. Yep. IMHO the requirements of the usual LAMP user of a Debian or other packaged Linux distro are not the same as the typical rails developer. The former usually wants a fairly stable platform, the latter wants to keep up with the rapidly changing universe of Ruby, Rails, gems, … Ruby developers are used to, and a lot expect, the ability to quickly upgrade, and even deal with multiple versions on the same box for different applications. Having multiple versions of ruby gems installed has long been a feature of gems. Rails developers use techniques like unpacking gems and rails itself into a vendor directory of the app to allow different apps with different requirements as to versions and sets of gems to run on the same box. And today the state of the art is tools like RVM which allow multiple versions and implementations of Ruby to coexist and be selectable. You can have various versions of MRI (1.8.6, 1.8.7, 1.9.1) along with Rubinius, JRuby, MagLev, (and on a Mac MacRuby). The Debian packaging system is really built around having one version of a given package installed at a time. The maintainers of ruby packages for debian, occasionally take new versions and repackage them. Waiting for that process is unacceptable for a lot of Ruby developers. Also the repackaging sometimes takes some interesting twists, at one point rails got repackaged, and the rails binary was re-written as a bash shell script! I don’t know if that’s still the case because… Early on in my use of Ruby, I was advised to just say no to the packaged versions and build from source, On a Debian system just make sure to install it somewhere which the packaging system doesn’t muck with, like /user/local/… And I pretty much do the same thing now that most of my development is on OS X. – Rick DeNatale Blog: [http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/](http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/) Twitter: [http://twitter.com/RickDeNatale](http://twitter.com/RickDeNatale) WWR: [http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/9021-rick-denatale](http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/9021-rick-denatale) LinkedIn: [Rick DeNatale - Developer - IBM | LinkedIn](http://www.linkedin.com/in/rickdenatale) ---
**Author:** ![snow-templar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/977dab/32.png) [@snow-templar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/snow-templar)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2010, 8:16pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/problems-with-rubygems-on-a-debian-machine/182955/8 "2010-02-10T20:16:27Z")
My previous suggestion doesn’t work on Debian using apt. Lenny has rubygems 1.2.0-3, while squeeze (testing) has rubygems 1.3.5-2. Neither has rubygems 1.3.1. This, however, did work. It’s not ready for production yet. Debian squeeze (testing machine) - ruby 1.9.1.376-1 rubygems 1.3.5-2 It turns out all I needed was the right version of rack-mount. So I did this: gem install tzinfo builder memcache-client rack rack-test rack-mount erubis mail text-format thor bundler i18n sudo gem install rack-mount --version 0.4.0 sudo gem install rails --pre Thomas Lucero said: ---
**Author:** ![snow-templar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/977dab/32.png) [@snow-templar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/snow-templar)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2010, 9:53pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/problems-with-rubygems-on-a-debian-machine/182955/9 "2010-02-10T21:53:39Z")
Rick Denatale wrote: > On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 11:59 AM, Thomas Lucero > [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > > > repositories are not always up-to-date, e.g. the latest Rails version is > > often not available. > > Yep. IMHO the requirements of the usual LAMP user of a Debian or other > packaged Linux distro are not the same as the typical rails developer. > The former usually wants a fairly stable platform, the latter wants > to keep up with the rapidly changing universe of Ruby, Rails, gems, > … > > Ruby developers are used to, and a lot expect, the ability to quickly > upgrade, and even deal with multiple versions on the same box for > different applications. Having multiple versions of ruby gems > installed has long been a feature of gems. Rails developers use > techniques like unpacking gems and rails itself into a vendor > directory of the app to allow different apps with different > requirements as to versions and sets of gems to run on the same box. > And today the state of the art is tools like RVM which allow multiple > versions and implementations of Ruby to coexist and be selectable. > You can have various versions of MRI (1.8.6, 1.8.7, 1.9.1) along with > Rubinius, JRuby, MagLev, (and on a Mac MacRuby). Right. > The Debian packaging system is really built around having one version > of a given package installed at a time. The maintainers of ruby > packages for debian, occasionally take new versions and repackage > them. Waiting for that process is unacceptable for a lot of Ruby > developers. Also the repackaging sometimes takes some interesting > twists, at one point rails got repackaged, and the rails binary was > re-written as a bash shell script! I don’t know if that’s still the > case because… > > Early on in my use of Ruby, I was advised to just say no to the > packaged versions and build from source, On a Debian system just make > sure to install it somewhere which the packaging system doesn’t muck > with, like /user/local/… I haven’t used Debian as such for Ruby, but on Ubuntu the packaged Ruby is fine. No reason to build from source. > And I pretty much do the same thing now that most of my development is > on OS X. What a waste of time, effort, and disk space. Leopard’s version of MRI 1.8 is absolutely fine. I have had no problems with it at all. > – > Rick DeNatale > > Blog: [http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/](http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/) > Twitter: [http://twitter.com/RickDeNatale](http://twitter.com/RickDeNatale) > WWR: [http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/9021-rick-denatale](http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/9021-rick-denatale) > LinkedIn: [Rick DeNatale - Developer - IBM | LinkedIn](http://www.linkedin.com/in/rickdenatale) Best, –Â Marnen Laibow-Koser [http://www.marnen.org](http://www.marnen.org) removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid