Installing Ruby on Rails on Mac OS 10.5 or patching Dan Benjamin’s guide

Update: Dan has posted his updated guide for installing Ruby on Rails on Leopard.

I don’t think there are too many people who hasn’t come across either of Dan Benjamin’s guides when looking to install Ruby on Rails on a Mac. They are simple, to the point and you could basically copy and paste to get Ruby, Rails, MySQL and depending on which guide either Mongrel or LightTPD installed, but since the release of Leopard the instructions if unaltered would fail when installing Readline, Ruby and Subversion. Dan has mentioned that he will be providing an update to the guide for Leopard users, but with a new baby and job it might (and justifiably so) be a bit before he has the chance to finish them. What I’m going to cover are the additional steps I added to Dan’s guide to get everything up and running for me. First thing to do is read his guide making sure to note the following sections: What’s needed (except we are using OS 10.5 and Xcode 3.0), bash, Quick Warning, sudo and paths. To get the parts of Dan’s guide that would fail to work we will be applying some patches to Readline, Ruby and Subversion. If you are uncomfortable with this then I would suggest that you wait for his updated guide. And if you haven’t already tried installing the unaltered version on Leopard, consider running through each step to see the error before and after the patches. And remember just as he points out himself these instructions are completely use at your own risk and I do not take responsibility for anything resulting from following them.

Before you begin

Make sure to follow the steps from his guide to install Xcode, update your path and create the directory at /usr/local/src if you have not already done so.

Ruby

If you have tried his guide while using Leopard you probably got stuck at the first step when trying to compile readline. You will need to apply a patch from the developers, because the unpatched version of readline checks for the version of the operating system but does not include darwin9 (Leopard) in it’s list. We will be applying a patch to the file support/shobj-conf located in the readline-5.2 directory in /usr/local/src/ and then we can compile it without getting an error. You should also notice that we are installing the latest stable version.

curl -O ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/readline/readline-5.2.tar.gz

tar xzvf readline-5.2.tar.gz

cd readline-5.2

curl -O http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/readline/readline-5.2-patches/readline52-012

patch -p0 < readline52-012

./configure --prefix=/usr/local

make

sudo make install

cd ..

And now on to installing Ruby. While looking into why Ruby would segfault during the install I came across Laurent Sansonetti’s explanation and the set of patches that are applied to Ruby by Apple for the version that Mac OS ships with.

curl -O ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.6-p111.tar.gz

tar xzvf ruby-1.8.6-p111.tar.gz

cd ruby-1.8.6-p111

curl http://chopine.be/lrz/ruby-osx-patches/dot-darwin.diff | patch -p0

curl http://chopine.be/lrz/ruby-osx-patches/etc-irbrc.diff | patch -p0

curl http://chopine.be/lrz/ruby-osx-patches/ignore-gsetcontext.diff | patch -p0

curl http://chopine.be/lrz/ruby-osx-patches/md5_sha1_commoncrypto.diff | patch -p0

curl http://chopine.be/lrz/ruby-osx-patches/use-dyld.diff | patch -p0

curl http://chopine.be/lrz/ruby-osx-patches/use-setreugid.diff | patch -p0

curl http://chopine.be/lrz/ruby-osx-patches/words-bigendian-from-arch.diff | patch -p0

./configure --prefix=/usr/local --enable-pthread --with-readline-dir=/usr/local --enable-shared

make

sudo make install

sudo make install-doc

cd ..

RubyGems

Only change here is using the current version.

curl -O http://files.rubyforge.mmmultiworks.com/rubygems/rubygems-1.0.1.tgz

tar xzvf rubygems-1.0.1.tgz

cd rubygems-1.0.1

sudo /usr/local/bin/ruby setup.rb

cd ..

Ruby on Rails

sudo gem install rails --include-dependencies

Remember one change in Rails 2.0.2 is that SQLite3 is now the default database. When you followed Dan’s instructions and changed the path you lost the SQLite3 bindings for Rails that Leopard ships with so we need to add them back.

gem install sqlite3-ruby

Mongrel

Just like RubyGems no changes here except it will be grabbing the latest version.

sudo gem install mongrel --include-dependencies

Subversion

This would be the next step that you should see an error while following the unaltered guide. I came across a patch from Brian D. Wells that allowed for me to complete the install.

curl -O http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.4.6.tar.gz

curl -O http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-deps-1.4.6.tar.gz

tar xzvf subversion-1.4.6.tar.gz

tar xzvf subversion-deps-1.4.6.tar.gz

cd subversion-1.4.6

curl -O http://homepage.mac.com/brianwells/.Public/apr_darwin_smb_patch

patch -d apr -p0 <apr_darwin_smb_patch

./configure --prefix=/usr/local --with-openssl --with-ssl --with-zlib

Edit the file /usr/local/src/subversion-1.4.6/apr/include/apr.h

Changing the line #define APR_HAS_SENDFILE 1 to #define APR_HAS_SENDFILE 0

make

sudo make install

cd ..

Capistrano

sudo gem install capistrano --include-dependencies

sudo gem install termios --include-dependencies

MySQL

And finally we’re ready to follow Dan’s instructions to install MySQL.

Alternatives

A big thanks to Dan for creating each of these guides and keeping them updated over the years. I hope you find these additions useful and remember usually there are a few different alternatives to doing something.