When I decided to open a Ruby section, I thought that it would be a good idea to have all examples powered by Ruby itself. In the middle of creation of PHP wrappers I've found that a) ruby version provided by 1and1 is 1.8.1 (pretty old), and b) gems are not installed.

Googling for possible solutions brought useful blog entries by Ed Johnson, Pascal and James Stewart (as I am not interested in Rails for now, I do not have Ed's problems).

After several attempts and playing with different configuration settings I finally succeeded - and all future Ruby posts will be powered by Ruby!

And, as one of my favorite programming principles - The Pragmatic Programmers' DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) - naturally evolves to DAO TRAY (Don't Ask Others To Repeat After You), I've captured the sequence of commands in a shell script.

If you have a shared 1and1 (or any other provider) linux host with ssh access, you can just download and run the script:

wget http://softover.com/files/ruby_install.sh
ruby_install.sh

If you don't like downloading scripts, you can re-type all commands yourself:

pushd ~
mkdir bin
cd bin
mkdir ruby
cd ruby

# Get and install ruby

wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz
tar -zxvf ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.8.6
#### get patch for ossl.h
#### please see notes below
wget http://softover.com/files/ossl.patch
patch ext/openssl/ossl.h ossl.patch
#### end patch
./configure prefix=~/bin/ruby
make
make install
echo 'export PATH=~/bin/ruby/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.bash_profile
export PATH=~/bin/ruby/bin:$PATH
cd ..

# Get and install gems
 
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/20989/rubygems-0.9.4.tgz
tar -zxvf rubygems-0.9.4.tgz
cd rubygems-0.9.4
echo 'export GEM_HOME=~/bin/ruby' >> ~/.bash_profile
export GEM_HOME=~/bin/ruby
ruby setup.rb config --prefix=~/bin/ruby
ruby setup.rb setup
ruby setup.rb install
popd

Some of you can see patching on the same level of danger as running scripts. Instead of patching you can fix a bug in ossl.h yourself:
Open ~/bin/ruby/ruby-1.8.6/ext/openssl/ossl.h in your favorite text editor. Find at the top part of file section

/*
* OpenSSL has defined RFILE and Ruby has defined RFILE - so undef it!
*/
#if defined(RFILE) /*&& !defined(OSSL_DEBUG)*/
#  undef RFILE
#endif
#include <ruby.h>
#include <rubyio.h>

Cut it and paste right after the last include line

#include <openssl/conf_api.h>

Coming next: Running Ruby from PHP