Next Generation Ruby packages for Ubuntu 11 Apr 12

We’ve been busy at work on new packages to provide the very latest versions of Ruby and Rubygems for Ubuntu.

We’ve been providing optimized Ruby 1.8 and Rubygems 1.3.7 packages for Ubuntu for years now but some technical issues prevented us from providing 1.9.3 packages alongside them. So we started out afresh from the very latest Debian 1.8.7 and 1.9.3 packages, and added:

So this gives you Ruby 1.8.7, Ruby 1.9.3 and Rubygems 1.8.21 on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid through to the upcoming Ubuntu 12.04 Precise. You can install both Ruby 1.8.7 and 1.9.3 alongside each other and switch between them effortlessly. We’ve also updated our Passenger packages to work with both versions of Ruby (and our NGINX Passenger packages too).

All the above packages are available right now for testing in our experimental Launchpad package repository. You can add the repository to your servers like this:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:brightbox/ruby-ng
sudo apt-get update

and you can install or upgrade ruby like this:

sudo apt-get install ruby rubygems ruby-switch

If you’re upgrading, some packages have been replaced so you will see apt removing some packages (such as rubygems1.8, irb1.8 and others) – don’t panic :)

To install Ruby 1.9.3:

sudo apt-get install ruby1.9.1

More about the packages and how to use them on our wiki.

We’re already using these packages in a few places and have found them stable but they need more testing. Whether you’re a customer or not, please do have a play with them and report back with any successes or failures (to support@brightbox.co.uk).

An ideal way to play with them would be on a Brightbox Cloud server ;)

Posted 11 April 2012 by

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14 Comments

  1. 1 year ago kalmogorov said:

    is there a repo for the 1.9.3 fork you’re using? i’m a tad confused as you mention adding lazy sweep to 1.9.3 which is already included and point to an article on bmap. which are you including backports for? bmap or lsweep?

  2. 1 year ago John Leach said:

    kalmogorov: whoops, a mistake in the blog post. Not lazy sweep gc, I meant bitmap marking gc. Fixed now. Thanks!

    The patch applied by the package is available here btw: https://github.com/johnl/deb-ruby1.9.1/blob/master/debian/patches/120303_funny_falcon_performance_and_gc_backport.patch

  3. 1 year ago Evan Phoenix said:

    Is there a reason to ship with these patches that are not in directly in the releases? There is a reason that ruby-core hasn’t accepted them, and I think it’s a mistake to put them in the general purpose packages. It makes it much harder to help users debug when they don’t even know they’ve got these patches applied and the patches alter internal behaviors.

  4. 1 year ago John Leach said:

    Evan: thanks for the feedback. I agree with you, but arguably these are not general purpose packages as they are optional addons to the existing distro’s packages.

    The upcoming Ubuntu Precise release has very good vanilla upstream 1.9.3 packages available. The waters are a little muddier with Oneiric et. al, as they don’t have 1.9.3 packages, and especially Lucid which is still a LTS and has no useful 1.9.x packages at all.

    I think what we might do is maintain two sets of packages: these experimental ones with the patches for all Ubuntu releases, and a straight upstream set of 1.9.3 packages for everything below Precise.

    I think we’ll only offer Ruby EE packages though as again, 1.8 is well represented in the default repositories.

    It’s obviously still an option for us to back out some of the patches from the experimental packages though, if they’re causing real problems.

  5. 1 year ago Kyle Drake said:

    So would the vanilla be 1.9.3 and this would be 1.9.3-experimental or something like that? I would definitely use the vanilla for production, just to be safe. That said, your patched version sounds really bad ass, and I want to be able to use that too. I wonder if Ruby core has even considered using TCMalloc. This is the first time I’ve heard of it. Reminds me of when Firefox started using jemalloc.

  6. 1 year ago brainopia said:

    Very nice! Thanks for doing amazing job.

  7. 1 year ago Travis said:

    Awesome news!

  8. 1 year ago munkyboy said:

    Great work! Are these packages compatible with deb squeeze?

  9. 1 year ago Ubuntu 12.04 – 11.0 XBMC Eden in the official repositoriess « The 1000yr Old Man said:

    [...] Next Generation Ruby packages for Ubuntu (brightbox.co.uk) [...]

  10. 1 year ago John Leach said:

    munkyboy: the lucid packages do install on Debian Squeeze actually, but we’ve not tested them. We’re considering doing Squeeze auto-builds.

  11. 1 year ago glasz said:

    i’m on ubuntu 10.10, followed your instructions but apt complains it cannot find a package called “ruby-switch” which, i myself, cannot find using aptitude. anyone?

  12. 1 year ago The Mega April 2012 Ruby and Rails News Roundup said:

    [...] Next Generation MRI Ruby Packages for Ubuntu Available The Brightbox brainboxes have been hard at work on new MRI Ruby packages (of 1.8.7 and 1.9.3) for Ubuntu. They're ready for you to test right now – instructions inside. [...]

  13. 1 year ago Allerin - Ruby on Rails said:

    Thank You for sharing the patches of Ruby Enterprise Edition. I tried these and it works great.

  14. 1 year ago John Leach said:

    glasz: Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick) is no longer supported by Ubuntu so we’re not building packages for it. You really should look at upgrading to at least natty as you’ll be missing the latest security fixes!

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