Building Ruby ↑

Dependencies ↑

  1. Install the prerequisite dependencies for building the CRuby interpreter:

    • C compiler

    For RubyGems, you will also need:

    • OpenSSL 1.1.x or 3.0.x / LibreSSL

    • libyaml 0.1.7 or later

    • zlib

    If you want to build from the git repository, you will also need:

    • autoconf - 2.67 or later

    • gperf - 3.1 or later

      • Usually unneeded; only if you edit some source files using gperf

    • ruby - 3.0 or later

      • We can upgrade this version to system ruby version of the latest Ubuntu LTS.

  2. Install optional, recommended dependencies:

    • libffi (to build fiddle)

    • gmp (if you with to accelerate Bignum operations)

    • libexecinfo (FreeBSD)

    • rustc - 1.58.0 or later, if you wish to build YJIT.

    If you installed the libraries needed for extensions (openssl, readline, libyaml, zlib) into other than the OS default place, typically using Homebrew on macOS, add --with-EXTLIB-dir options to CONFIGURE_ARGS environment variable.

    export CONFIGURE_ARGS=""
for ext in openssl readline libyaml zlib; do
  CONFIGURE_ARGS="${CONFIGURE_ARGS} --with-$ext-dir=$(brew --prefix $ext)"
done

Quick start guide ↑

  1. Download ruby source code:

    Select one of the below.

    1. Build from the tarball:

      Download the latest tarball from ruby-lang.org and extract it. Example for Ruby 3.0.2:

      tar -xzf ruby-3.0.2.tar.gz
cd ruby-3.0.2

    2. Build from the git repository:

      Checkout the CRuby source code:

      git clone https://github.com/ruby/ruby.git
cd ruby

      Generate the configure file:

      ./autogen.sh

  2. Create a build directory separate from the source directory:

    mkdir build && cd build

    While it's not necessary to build in a separate directory, it's good practice to do so.

  3. We'll install Ruby in ~/.rubies/ruby-master, so create the directory:

    mkdir ~/.rubies

  4. Run configure:

    ../configure --prefix="${HOME}/.rubies/ruby-master"

    • Also -C (or --config-cache) would reduce time to configure from the next time.

  5. Build Ruby:

    make

  6. Run tests to confirm your build succeeded.

  7. Install Ruby:

    make install

    • If you need to run make install with sudo and want to avoid document generation with different permissions, you can use make SUDO=sudo install.

Unexplainable Build Errors ↑

If you are having unexplainable build errors, after saving all your work, try running git clean -xfd in the source root to remove all git ignored local files. If you are working from a source directory that's been updated several times, you may have temporary build artifacts from previous releases which can cause build failures.

Building on Windows ↑

The documentation for building on Windows can be found here.

More details ↑

If you're interested in continuing development on Ruby, here are more details about Ruby's build to help out.

Running make scripts in parallel ↑

In GNU make and BSD make implementations, to run a specific make script in parallel, pass the flag -j<number of processes>. For instance, to run tests on 8 processes, use:

make test-all -j8

We can also set MAKEFLAGS to run all make commands in parallel.

Having the right --jobs flag will ensure all processors are utilized when building software projects. To do this effectively, you can set MAKEFLAGS in your shell configuration/profile:

# On macOS with Fish shell:
export MAKEFLAGS="--jobs "(sysctl -n hw.ncpu)

# On macOS with Bash/ZSH shell:
export MAKEFLAGS="--jobs $(sysctl -n hw.ncpu)"

# On Linux with Fish shell:
export MAKEFLAGS="--jobs "(nproc)

# On Linux with Bash/ZSH shell:
export MAKEFLAGS="--jobs $(nproc)"

Miniruby vs Ruby ↑

Miniruby is a version of Ruby which has no external dependencies and lacks certain features. It can be useful in Ruby development because it allows for faster build times. Miniruby is built before Ruby. A functional Miniruby is required to build Ruby. To build Miniruby:

make miniruby

Debugging ↑

You can use either lldb or gdb for debugging. Before debugging, you need to create a test.rb with the Ruby script you’d like to run. You can use the following make targets:

Compiling for Debugging ↑

You should configure Ruby without optimization and other flags that may interfere with debugging:

./configure --enable-debug-env optflags="-O0 -fno-omit-frame-pointer"

Building with Address Sanitizer ↑

Using the address sanitizer (ASAN) is a great way to detect memory issues. It can detect memory safety issues in Ruby itself, and also in any C extensions compiled with and loaded into a Ruby compiled with ASAN.

./autogen.sh
mkdir build && cd build
../configure CC=clang-18 cflags="-fsanitize=address -fno-omit-frame-pointer -DUSE_MN_THREADS=0" # and any other options you might like
make

The compiled Ruby will now automatically crash with a report and a backtrace if ASAN detects a memory safety issue. To run Ruby’s test suite under ASAN, issue the following command. Note that this will take quite a long time (over two hours on my laptop); the RUBY_TEST_TIMEOUT_SCALE and SYNTAX_SUGEST_TIMEOUT variables are required to make sure tests don’t spuriously fail with timeouts when in fact they’re just slow.

RUBY_TEST_TIMEOUT_SCALE=5 SYNTAX_SUGGEST_TIMEOUT=600 make check

Please note, however, the following caveats!

How to measure coverage of C and Ruby code ↑

You need to be able to use gcc (gcov) and lcov visualizer.

./autogen.sh
./configure --enable-gcov
make
make update-coverage
rm -f test-coverage.dat
make test-all COVERAGE=true
make lcov
open lcov-out/index.html

If you need only C code coverage, you can remove COVERAGE=true from the above process. You can also use gcov command directly to get per-file coverage.

If you need only Ruby code coverage, you can remove --enable-gcov. Note that test-coverage.dat accumulates all runs of make test-all. Make sure that you remove the file if you want to measure one test run.

You can see the coverage result of CI: rubyci.org/coverage