I love a bit of Ruby. I also love rbenv, and Solaris.

Getting things running on Solaris seems to get more difficult every week. Today I had problems getting Ruby 2.6.0 to install on a clean Solaris 11.4 build.

A little bit of log-reading showed two problems. First, rbenv (or, more likely, the build plugin), appears to assume a GNU tool chain. This is not new. 90% of the world thinks only Linux exists, 99% thinks there’s only Linux and Mac.

Once you’ve fixed that, you’ll find that Solaris has (not unreasonably) deprecated a whole bunch of OpenSSL stuff. This breaks the build.

Assuming you have a machine with a decent build environment (GCC and friends) your workaround is:

$ PATH=/usr/gnu/bin:$PATH RUBY_CFLAGS="-DOPENSSL_NO_MD5" rbenv install 2.6.0

If you need the mysql2 gem, like I did, you’ll have to point it to the right place with

$ gem install mysql2 -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/mysql/5.7/bin/mysql_config

or, if you’re using Bundler

$ bundle config build.mysql2 --with-mysql-config=/usr/mysql/5.7/bin/mysql_config

To install the gem on OmniOS:

$ MAKE=gmake gem install mysql2 -- --with-mysql-config=/opt/ooce/bin/mysql_config

I haven’t had installation difficulties with any other native extension gems so far, even ffi.