Installing Ruby 2.3 on Archlinux

I’ve been running Archlinux for a few years now. I ran Ubuntu for a 8 years before that and frequently ran into issues with old packages that eventually spurred me to jump to Arch where I get to deal with issues in new packages instead. “Pick your poison” as the saying goes.

Today I needed to get an app running that required Ruby 2.3.3 and, true to form, the poison of the day was all about the libraries installed on my system being to new to compile Ruby 2.3.

I’m a long time user of Rbenv. It’s nice and clean and it’s ruby-build plugin makes installing new versions of Ruby as easy as rbenv install 2.3.3… which is exactly what kicked off the fun.

[mike@longshot identity-idp]$ rbenv install 2.3.3
Downloading ruby-2.3.3.tar.bz2...
-> https://cache.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/2.3/ruby-2.3.3.tar.bz2
Installing ruby-2.3.3...
*** Error in `./miniruby': malloc(): memory corruption: 0x00007637497798d8 ***
======= Backtrace: =========
/usr/lib/libc.so.6(+0x72bdd)[0x66e27048fbdd]
...
./miniruby(+0x2470b)[0x80e03b1670b]
/usr/lib/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xea)[0x66e27043d4ca]
./miniruby(_start+0x2a)[0x80e03b1673a]
======= Memory map: ========
80e03af2000-80e03de0000 r-xp 00000000 00:27 154419
...
66e2715e7000-66e2715e8000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0
763748f81000-763749780000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0                          [stack]

BUILD FAILED (Arch Linux using ruby-build 20170726-9-g86909bf)

Inspect or clean up the working tree at /tmp/ruby-build.20170828122031.16671
Results logged to /tmp/ruby-build.20170828122031.16671.log

Last 10 log lines:
generating enc.mk
creating verconf.h
./template/encdb.h.tmpl:86:in `<main>': undefined local variable or method `encidx' for main:Object (NameError)
	from /tmp/ruby-build.20170828122031.16671/ruby-2.3.3/lib/erb.rb:864:in `eval'
	from /tmp/ruby-build.20170828122031.16671/ruby-2.3.3/lib/erb.rb:864:in `result'
	from ./tool/generic_erb.rb:38:in `<main>'
make: *** [uncommon.mk:818: encdb.h] Error 1
make: *** Waiting for unfinished jobs....
verconf.h updated
make: *** [uncommon.mk:655: enc.mk] Aborted (core dumped)

The issues here are twofold; Ruby 2.3 won’t build with GCC 7 or OpenSSL 1.1. Arch as it stands today has both by default.

[mike@longshot ~]$ openssl version
OpenSSL 1.1.0f  25 May 2017
[mike@longshot ~]$ gcc -v
gcc version 7.1.1 20170630 (GCC)

To solve the OpenSSL problem we need 1.0 installed (sudo pacman -S openssl-1.0, but it’s probably installed already), and we need to tell ruby-build where to find both the header files, and the openssl directory itself.

Helping compilers find header files is the job of pkg-config. On Arch the config files that do that are typically in /usr/lib/pkgconfig/ but in this case we want to point to the pkg-config file in /usr/lib/openssl/1.0/pkgconfig before searching there. To do that we assign a colon-delimited set of paths to PKG_CONFIG_PATH.

Then we need to tell Ruby where the openssl directory is which is done via RUBY_CONFIGURE_OPTS.

[mike@longshot ~]$ PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/lib/openssl-1.0/pkgconfig/:/usr/lib/pkgconfig/ RUBY_CONFIGURE_OPTS=--with-openssl-dir=/usr/lib/openssl-1.0/ rbenv install 2.3.3
Downloading ruby-2.3.3.tar.bz2...
-> https://cache.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/2.3/ruby-2.3.3.tar.bz2
Installing ruby-2.3.3...

BUILD FAILED (Arch Linux using ruby-build 20170726-9-g86909bf)

Inspect or clean up the working tree at /tmp/ruby-build.20170829103308.24191
Results logged to /tmp/ruby-build.20170829103308.24191.log

Last 10 log lines:
  R8: 0x0000016363058550  R9: 0x0000016362cc3dd8 R10: 0x0000016362fafe80
 R11: 0x000000000000001b R12: 0x0000000000000031 R13: 0x0000016363059a40
 R14: 0x0000000000000000 R15: 0x00000163630599a0 EFL: 0x0000000000010202

-- C level backtrace information -------------------------------------------
linking static-library libruby-static.a
ar: `u' modifier ignored since `D' is the default (see `U')
verifying static-library libruby-static.a
make: *** [uncommon.mk:655: enc.mk] Segmentation fault (core dumped)
make: *** Waiting for unfinished jobs....

Our OpenSSL errors fixed we now get the segfault that comes from GCC 7. So we need to install an earlier gcc (sudo pacman -S gcc5) add two more variables (CC and CXX) to specify the C and C++ compilers to we want used.

[mike@longshot ~]$ CC=gcc-5 CXX=g++-5 PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/lib/openssl-1.0/pkgconfig/:/usr/lib/pkgconfig/ RUBY_CONFIGURE_OPTS=--with-openssl-dir=/usr/lib/openssl-1.0/ rbenv install 2.3.3
Downloading ruby-2.3.3.tar.bz2...
-> https://cache.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/2.3/ruby-2.3.3.tar.bz2
Installing ruby-2.3.3...
Installed ruby-2.3.3 to /home/mike/.rbenv/versions/2.3.3

With that done, you should now have a working Ruby 2.3:

[mike@longshot ~]$ rbenv global 2.3.3
[mike@longshot ~]$ ruby -e "puts 'hello world'"
hello world