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How to update Ruby on CentOS 5.x

Posted by: on Jun 22, 2011 | 2 Comments Tags: , , ,

CentOS is great and by far my preferred distro, however it’s package support is terrible. Whilst it’s ties to RHEL make it solid and usable the lack of repos really does cause a load of headaches.

Today came Ruby and trying to update the extremely out of date version that the Centos repos include.

$ sudo yum groupinstall 'Development Tools'
$ sudo yum install readline-devel
$ cd /usr/local/src
$ wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.1-p376.tar.gz
$ tar xzvf ruby-1.9.1-p376.tar.gz
$ cd ruby-1.9.1-p376
$ ./configure && make
$ sudo make install

Everything you need is in the development tools, except for readline-devel.

You might want to visit the Ruby website to make sure you get the latest version.


2 Comments

  1. Pauly
    September 27, 2011

    Compiling from source on a CentOS machine is wrong, that is the whole point of yum.

    Reply
    • MojoWill
      September 27, 2011

      Normally yum is fine as a package installer even though you may have to add additional repos outside the base, but compiling from source is not wrong. Is Chrome wrong because Windows already comes with Internet Explorer? Sometimes you have to compile form source to simply get what you want PHP for instance often needs re-compiling from source to get the options and modules etc that you may need for your particular setup.

      yum is great but it doesn’t do everything!

      Reply

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