Installing OpenSSL Support for Ruby on Ubuntu

The more I work with Ubuntu, the more I think it's a very good desktop, but not a good development machine. For instance, you can install Ruby 1.8.4 from the package management system, but not 1.8.5 (or 1.8.6 which is now the latest). So you're stuck compiling ruby on your own.

Usually that's not too big of a deal. However, for some reason, the default way of compiling Ruby from source on Ubuntu leaves out the installation of OpenSSL support. I had the development openssl libraries package installed, so that wasn't it. I didn't see any errors in the configure process or during compilation.

Turns out, to get OpenSSL to compile and install with Ruby on Ubuntu, you need to follow these steps *after you've installed ruby*:

cd ruby_src_dir/ext/openssl
ruby extconf.rb
make
make install

Success!

That seems a bit harder than it should be, huh?

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