Installing Ruby under Mac OS X

Ruby
1

I just downloaded the source for Ruby 1.8.5-p12 and built it under
Mac OS X using the following steps.

unzip and untar the downloaded file
cd to the directory createed by untarring
su root
./configure
make
make test - reports “test succeeded”
make install
make install-doc

When I run “ruby -v”, I get “ruby 1.8.5 (2006-12-25 patchlevel 12)
[i686-darwin8.8.1]”.
When I run “ruby -rrbconfig -e ‘p Config::CONFIG[“ruby_version”]’”, I
get “.”.
I should be getting “1.8.5”. Am I doing something wrong in the way
I’m installing Ruby?

This is preventing me from installing gems. I get the following.
ERROR: While executing gem … (ArgumentError)
install directory “/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/./gems/
activesupport-1.4.0” not absolute

2

Mark V. wrote:

I just downloaded the source for Ruby 1.8.5-p12 and built it under
Mac OS X using the following steps.

Mark -

I can’t speak to your specific error, but I had many issues with
building ruby from source on OS X. It’s very painless, on the other
hand, to use macports to install the latest version of ruby.

-Drew

3

On Jan 25, 2007, at 10:23 AM, Mark V. wrote:

make install-doc
install directory “/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/./gems/
activesupport-1.4.0” not absolute

I fixed this by editing /usr/local/lib/ruby/i686-darwin8.8.1/
rbconfig.rb. Here are the lines I changed.

CONFIG[“MAJOR”] = “1”
CONFIG[“MINOR”] = “8”
CONFIG[“TEENY”] = “5”

They were set to empty strings before my change and this was after a
clean install.

I can now install gems again!