Howto install Ruby Enterprise Edition on Ubuntu or Debian

I decided to test Ruby Enterprise Edition to see if it’s claims about reduced memory usage were true. All of my machines are 64-bit at this point but unfortunately Ruby Enterprise Edition is more optimized for the i386 architecture. Here are the instructions which I used to install Ruby Enterprise Edition on an Ubuntu 7/10 (Gutsy Gibbon) system.

• sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient15-dev build-essential ruby1.8-dev
  • There may be other packages needed for compilation that I had already installed but these are ones that I think are necessary.
• wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/38803/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080624.tar.gz
  • This file is about 7MB.
• tar -zxvf ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080624.tar.gz
• cd ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080624
• sudo ./installer
  • I accepted all defaults on prompts.

To make use of Ruby Enterprise Edition under Passenger I made the following change in my Apache configuration:

• Before: PassengerRuby /usr/bin/ruby1.8
• After: PassengerRuby /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080624/bin/ruby

Ruby Enterprise Edition also keeps a separate gems directory. In order to to make Rails 2.0.2 available for my application I had to run the following command:

• /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080624/bin/gem install rails --version 2.0.2