Installing Ruby/ActiveLdap on Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 LTS or Feisty 7.04

• Installing Ruby on Rails, RubyGems, and ActiveLdap on Dapper via apt-get is pretty well impossible. On Feisty, Ruby and RubyGems can be installed with apt-get, but the version of Ruby/ActiveLdap is very old (0.7.4). Read more on why you don't want to use the packaging system to install Rails.
  (2007-08-21) The following instructions worked for me:

• Install slapd and db4.2-util:
  sudo apt-get install slapd db4.2-util
• During install, you will be asked to provide a password. With this password you can administer the example database that is automatically created. The dn for this administrator is:
  cn=admin,dc=nodomain
• Install the OpenLDAP development libraries, needed to compile ruby-ldap later on.
  sudo apt-get install libldap2-dev
• Most likely, you want ssl compiled into ruby...
  sudo apt-get install libssl-dev

• Install Ruby. Check Ruby for the latest version.
  VERSION="1.8.6" # adapt to your needs sudo apt-get install build-essential sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev # we really need this wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/ruby-$VERSION.tar.gz tar zxvf ruby-$VERSION.tar.gz cd ruby-$VERSION ./configure make make test sudo make install ruby -v # to see the installed version
• Install RubyGems. Check RubyForge for the latest version.
  VERSION="0.9.4" # adapt to your needs RFID="20989" # adapt to your needs wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/$RFID/rubygems-$VERSION.tgz tar zxvf rubygems-$VERSION.tgz cd rubygems-$VERSION sudo ruby setup.rb gem -v # to see the installed version

• Install Rails via RubyGems
  sudo gem install -y rails
  This should work, but it sometimes doesn't. I get the following error:
  Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org ERROR: While executing gem ... (Gem::GemNotFoundException) Could not find rails (> 0) in any repository
  Just try it again (maybe a couple of times) and eventually it will work. This problem is probably due to some timeout issues while downloading updates from the internet.

• Install Ruby/LDAP. It's not a gem yet. Check SourceForge for the latest version.
  VERSION="0.9.7" # adapt to your needs wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/ruby-ldap/ruby-ldap-$VERSION.tar.gz tar zxvf ruby-ldap-$VERSION.tar.gz cd ruby-ldap-$VERSION ruby extconf.rb --with-openldap2 make sudo make install
• Install ActiveLdap via the ruby-activeldap gem.
  sudo gem install -y ruby-activeldap
  The '-y' tells gem to also install dependencies. If the command fails, due to a timeout, just try it again. Eventually, it will work.

• Test installation (quick and dirty).
  irb -rubygems
  This shoud bring you into irb where you can test activeldap:
  irb(main):001:0> require 'active_ldap' => true irb(main):002:0>