You can build and run Rubinius from the source directory. You do not need to install Rubinius to run it. The directions below will detail both installing Rubinius and running it from the source directory.
Rubinius uses LLVM for the JIT compiler. Rubinius depends on a particular
version of LLVM and LLVM must be built with C++ RTTI (run-time type
information) enabled. The configure
script will automatically verify these
requirements when searching for an installed version of LLVM. If you do have
LLVM installed and Rubinius fails to link with it for any reason, pass
--skip-system
to the configure
script in the directions below.
The Rubinius source code is available as a tarball and as a project on Github. You can download the tarball here.
To use Git:
git clone git://github.com/rubinius/rubinius.git
If you are planning on using Rubinius to run your application, this is a good option. However, you can also run Rubinius directly from the source directory. See the next section for more details on that.
We recommend installing Rubinius to a location that does not require sudo
or
superuser privileges. To install Rubinius:
./configure --prefix=/path/to/install/dir
rake install
If you plan to work on Rubinius itself, you should use this option.
./configure
rake
If you are just trying out Rubinius, follow the directions to add the bin directory to your PATH.
However, if you are developing Rubinius, you should NOT add the bin
directory to your PATH because the Rubinius build system will pick up the
ruby
and rake
links to the Rubinius executable. Rubinius needs a separate
Ruby executable to bootstrap itself during the build process.