rubinius

Short walkthrough for installing Rubinius.

Trouble?

• Here: Common build problems and solutions
• IRC: #rubinius on irc://irc.freenode.net
• ML: http://groups.google.com/group/r...

Getting the software and required libraries

There are a few things that you need in order to be able to build and run Rubinius. Once you have installed the general requirements, install the Gems needed and then any platform-specific requirements.

General requirements

• GCC version 4.x
• GNU Bison
• gmake (GNU Make)
• pkg-config (configuration tool)
• libtool version >= 1.5
• Ruby version >= 1.8.4 (the Ruby language)
• RubyGems (Ruby package manager)
• Git (source control used by rubinius)
• zip and unzip commands (archiving)

Each package may have requirements of its own, of course.

If you want to avoid overriding your existing environment, you may want toinstall everything under its own prefix (such as /usr/local) and to name programs so they don't collide with your existing installation (such as naming GNU make as gmake instead). You can then adjust your PATH environment variable as needed for Rubinius development.

Requirements through RubyGems

• rake

Rake may be obtained with the gem install command. See gem help and http://www.rubygems.org for more information.

Rubinius

You should check Rubinius out through Git which we just installed. The invocation looks like this (note the git:// protocol if not copy-pasting):

    $ git clone git://git.rubini.us/code rubinius

When you receive commit rights, the above changes to:

    $ git clone git@git.rubini.us:code rubinius

This creates a new subdirectory rubinius/ containing the HEAD or most current version of Rubinius in your current path. If you are new to git or want to see the workflow used, see using git.

There are daily tarballs available but these are not stable: http://rubini.us/releases/daily/...

Getting the RubySpec submodules

You need to fetch the source for MSpec and the RubySpec submodules manually. After running 'git clone' above, run:

  rake spec:update

The spec:update task is also a dependency of the git:update task. So, if you use the rake tasks for updating your Rubinius sources, the MSpec and RubySpec source will automatically be updated. If you use the git commands manually, you will need to run rake spec:update also.

Compiling Rubinius

Once you have all the prerequisites installed, building rubinius is as simple as:

    $ cd /path/to/rubinius
    $ rake build

This will give you a binary, ./shotgun/rubinius which can then be invoked to run scripts. If your system compiler is not GCC 4.x, you can set the CC environment variable:

    $ CC=/path/to/gcc rake build

If you want a development version (no optimisations, extra debug info), definitely recommended for anyone planning to work with the C parts, set the DEV environment variable:

    $ DEV=1 rake build

Installing Rubinius

To install rbx as a shortcut for @./bin/rbx@:

    $ rake install

Troubleshooting and platform-specific notes

Missing Bison

The resulting errors of not having Bison installed can be confusing. This is because the compilation has problems in a later stage and it's easy to overlook the earlier warnings. If you're error comes down to a "missing grammar.c", you don't have Bison installed.

The following trace is a shorted example of how the error could look like:

    ...
    DEP hash.c
    DEP grammar_runtime.c
    bison -o grammar.c grammar.y
    make[2]: bison: Command not found
    DEP float.c
    DEP ffi_util.c
    ...
    DEP array.c
    DEP ar.c
    make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/rubinius/src/rubinius/shotgun/lib'
    make[2]: Entering directory `/home/rubinius/src/rubinius/shotgun/lib'
    bison -o grammar.c grammar.y
    make[2]: bison: Command not found
    CC ar.o
    CC array.o
    ...
    CC grammar.o
    cc: grammar.c: No such file or directory
    cc: no input files
    make[2]: *** [grammar.o] Error 1
    make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/rubinius/src/rubinius/shotgun/lib'
    make[1]: *** [lib/librubinius-0.8.0.so] Error 2
    make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/rubinius/src/rubinius/shotgun'
    make: *** [vm] Error 2
    rake aborted!
    Command failed with status (2): [make vm...]
    /home/rubinius/src/rubinius/Rakefile:121
    (See full trace by running task with --trace)

64-bit platforms

Currently mostly works on amd64 and Opteron. Other 64-bit platforms have not been tested.

Mac OS X with Fink

See http://42squared.com/posts/how_t...

If you are getting an error like this one:

    glibtool: link: cannot build libtool library `librubinius.la' from non-libtool objects: ...

This is probably because you are using an old glibtool (1.3.5 or similar) that came with Fink. This is the case when `which glibtool` returns /sw/bin/glibtool. You want to use /usr/bin/glibtool (1.5) instead. If you are radical you can just `sudo rm /sw/bin/glibtool` to fix this mess.

Ubuntu

For the build to succeed you will need these packages:

• libglib2.0-dev
• zlib1g-dev
• build-essential
• libreadline5-dev
• libssl-dev
• bison