Installing Ruby 1.9.x on macOS 10.13 (High Sierra)

Question

I've recently decided to look at an old Rails app running Ruby 1.9.2 and decided to try to install 1.9.2 on my macOS 10.13 machine.

I'm aware that gcc no longer ships with macOS so I remembered the old trick of using Homebrew Core's apple-gcc42 recipe, sadly the maximum version this works with is 10.9 (Mavericks). I tried my luck anyway and even followd rbenv's gcc compatibility notes:

(Note that Ruby < 2.0 does not have the with-readline-dir flag; use with-opt-dir instead.)

I tried the following command (note that I have rbenv's ruby-build plugin installed and up-to-date):

RUBY_CONFIGURE_OPTS="--with-opt-dir=/usr/local/opt/" CC=/usr/local/bin/gcc-4.2 rbenv install 1.9.2-p180
ruby-build: use libyaml from homebrew
  Downloading ruby-1.9.2-p180.tar.bz2...
  -> https://cache.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.2-p180.tar.bz2
  Installing ruby-1.9.2-p180...

  WARNING: ruby-1.9.2-p180 is past its end of life and is now unsupported.
  It no longer receives bug fixes or critical security updates.

  ruby-build: use readline from homebrew

  BUILD FAILED (OS X 10.13.3 using ruby-build 20180329)

  Inspect or clean up the working tree at /var/folders/0t/hft4_1h13wqd91mwcw2j94h80000gn/T/ruby-build.20180407090310.93949
  Results logged to /var/folders/0t/hft4_1h13wqd91mwcw2j94h80000gn/T/ruby-build.20180407090310.93949.log

  Last 10 log lines:
  /var/folders/0t/hft4_1h13wqd91mwcw2j94h80000gn/T/ruby-build.20180407090310.93949 /usr/local/bin
  /var/folders/0t/hft4_1h13wqd91mwcw2j94h80000gn/T/ruby-build.20180407090310.93949/ruby-1.9.2-p180 /var/folders/0t/hft4_1h13wqd91mwcw2j94h80000gn/T/ruby-build.20180407090310.93949 /usr/local/bin
  configure: WARNING: unrecognized options: --with-openssl-dir, --with-libyaml-dir, --with-readline-dir
  checking build system type... i386-apple-darwin17.4.0
  checking host system type... i386-apple-darwin17.4.0
  checking target system type... i386-apple-darwin17.4.0
  checking whether the C compiler works... no
  configure: error: in `/var/folders/0t/hft4_1h13wqd91mwcw2j94h80000gn/T/ruby-build.20180407090310.93949/ruby-1.9.2-p180':
  configure: error: C compiler cannot create executables
  See `config.log' for more details

The error on the config.log is the same as the one output above:

configure:3446: error: C compiler cannot create executables

I tried to compile a basic file with C code and gcc-4.2 failed to do so (unlike /usr/local/bin/gcc) which I tells me gcc-4.2 simply doesn't work on macOS 10.13 right now. Perhaps the only way forward would be to find a way to compile old Rubies with modern gcc versions, but I'm guessing that might involve making a lot of manual changes to the configure files to make them compatible.

I'm just curious if anyone's succeeded in this endeavor or if this is a lost cause.

I haven't tried this, but my 1.9 and even 1.8 built a few versions back seem to work. I'd be happy to send you any binaries. — Keith Bennett, Apr 09 '18 at 00:44

lacostenycoder · Answer 1 · 2018-04-07T10:16:34.937

1

It's probably possible with rvm have a look at https://github.com/rvm/rvm/issues/3099 and also https://github.com/rvm/rvm/issues/3876

You should be able to install ruby-1.9.3

But if that doesn't work, you might consider spinning up a docker ubuntu container and install it that way? https://github.com/rvm/ubuntu_rvm

edited Apr 07 '18 at 10:16

answered Apr 07 '18 at 09:56

lacostenycoder

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My inclination would be to try using a VM/container, too. There's a good chance that the project contains other outdated libraries which have compilation issues on a modern machine. – Tom Lord Apr 07 '18 at 13:30

Installing Ruby 1.9.x on macOS 10.13 (High Sierra)

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