How to Install Ruby 1.9.3 and Rubygems 1.8.24 on CentOS 6.2

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Ruby is an object-oriented programming language that is similar in syntax to Perl and Python. The version of Ruby that ships with CentOS 6.2 is 1.8.7. If you need the latest version, you can download, compile and install Ruby from source code. This is a quick tutorial on installing Ruby 1.9.3 and Rubygems 1.8.24 on CentOS 6.2 from source.

Make sure your operating system packages are up to date by executing the following command:

yum update -y

In order to have all the proper dependencies installed, execute the following command:

yum groupinstall "Development Tools"

Then, follow the steps described below:

cd /root/
wget http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.3-p194.tar.gz

tar xvzf ruby-1.9.3-p194.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.9.3-p194
./configure
make
make install

Once the install is complete, verify the version of Ruby:

ruby --version
ruby 1.9.3p194 (2012-04-20 revision 35410)

Update to the latest RubyGems version (RubyGems is a sophisticated package management framework for Ruby.):

cd /root/
wget http://production.cf.rubygems.org/rubygems/rubygems-1.8.24.tgz
tar xvzf rubygems-1.8.24.tgz
cd rubygems-1.8.24
ruby setup.rb

Verify the version of RubyGems:

gem --version
1.8.24

Ensure you have the latest gem versions:

gem update --system

Install the Rake build language (Rake is a build tool written in Ruby, similar to make):

gem install rake

Install all of Rails and its dependencies:

gem install rails

List the installed gems:

gem list

That’s it! You now have a full Ruby on Rails stack up on CentOS 6.2.

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11 thoughts on “How to Install Ruby 1.9.3 and Rubygems 1.8.24 on CentOS 6.2”

  1. Please install yaml first
    $ wget http://pyyaml.org/download/libyaml/yaml-0.1.4.tar.gz
    $ tar xzvf yaml-0.1.4.tar.gz
    $ cd yaml-0.1.4
    $ ./configure –prefix=/usr/local
    $ make
    $ sudo make install

    Reply

  4. Thanks for this tutorial. I used it to install Ruby-1.9.3 on CentOS 6.5 .

    I had to apply the patch at https://gist.github.com/spkane/8059362 to fix openssl compile errors that I encountered after uninstalling CentOS 6.5’s included version of Ruby.

    This line seemed to cover any dependencies I needed:
    yum install -y gcc-c++ patch readline readline-devel zlib zlib-devel libffi libyaml libyaml-devel libffi-devel openssl-devel

    Reply

  5. Followed the ruby install but it did not update my current version. Do I just copy the contents from the ruby-1.9.3.-p194 folder to /usr/bin

    Reply

  6. Great stuff.
    But needs to be updated since rubyforge shut down May 2014 and has now been replaced by rubygems.org.
    So, currently as of this writing these are the modifications to the above I used
    Ruby
    wget http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/2.0/ruby-2.0.0-p481.tar.gz
    Ruby Gems
    wget http://production.cf.rubygems.org/rubygems/rubygems-2.3.0.tgz

    Also, CentOS 6.5 wants to see gem in /usr/bin/ while the current installer installs into /usr/local/bin/ so I created a symlink
    ln -s /usr/local/bin/gem /usr/bin/gem

    Reply

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