How to update Ruby on CentOS 5.x

CentOS is great and by far my preferred distro, however its package support is terrible. Whilst its 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Today came Ruby and trying to update the extremely out of date version that the CentOS repos include.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.

Filed under Developer. No comments, on purpose.