Installing MacRuby

Important: MacRuby requires Mac OS X 10.5.6, or later.

Releases

The latest release of MacRuby is 0.4.

Binary Releases

Binary releases are available in  http://www.macruby.org/files/. You can download the latest archive there and start the installer.

Important: The MacRuby 0.4 binary release does not support PowerPC processors.

Source Releases

Sources for every release are available in the SVN repository, within the tags directory. For example, to get the sources of the 0.4 release, you do:

$ svn co http://svn.macosforge.org/repository/ruby/MacRuby/tags/0.4 MacRuby-0.4

Development Branch

If you want to try the development branch, please read MacRubyDevelopment.

Building

Note: Since 0.3, MacRuby doesn't use autotools anymore but rake for its build system. If you are building 0.2 or a version below, please refer to InstallingAutotoolsBasedMacRuby.

Here is the recommended way to build and install MacRuby. This is actually the same way the versions installed by binary installers are built.

$ cd MacRuby-<version>
$ rake
$ sudo rake install

This will build MacRuby as a universal library (for Intel architectures) and install it as a framework, in /Library/Frameworks/MacRuby.framework.

Note: The MacRuby 0.4 source release for i386 and ppc processors can be built using the exact (bash) command below. However, some tests are known to fail (ie, YMMV).

$ RC_ARCHS="ppc i386" rake macruby

Executable utilities (such as irb, but also the ruby interpreter) will be available in /usr/local/bin, with a mac prefix to avoid potential collisions with your existing environment. For example, the MacRuby interpreter can be executed from the command line like this:

$ /usr/local/bin/macruby -e "p :hello"
:hello

Xcode templates will be installed and immediately available in Xcode.

Examples will be installed in /Developer/Examples/Ruby/MacRuby.

You can configure the build by passing options to rake (pass the -h flag to get help).

If you want to generate and install the RI files for the whole source tree, you can do:

$ sudo rake install_doc

Note that this process is quite slow, which is why it is not performed by the default target. We still plan to work on the performance.

And Now?

Once you're set, you can check out some samples in the /Developer/Examples/Ruby/MacRuby directory or go ahead and follow the MacRubyTutorial.

Found a problem? Please  file a ticket on the MacRuby component.