A customer wanted Amazon’s S3 tools installed on his Centos 5.3 server in order to backup important files off-network. The task is straight forward as it requires installing the usual Ruby interpreter, tools, and Gems. But as it turned out, cPanel appends an exclude line in /etc/yum.conf to prevent installing anything related to Ruby:

exclude=apache* bind-chroot courier* dovecot* exim* httpd* mod_ssl* mysql* nsd* perl* php* proftpd* pure-ftpd* ruby* spamassassin* squirrelmail*

I’m reluctant to un-exclude the ruby* entry as it could somehow break the cPanel production install. The next logical thing to do in this case is to scan /scripts for anything ruby related:

[/scripts]# ls -1|grep -i ruby
installruby*

Bingo! The cPanel conformant way of installing Ruby is to run /scripts/installruby. But it’s important to read cPanel’s document on RoR just in case. Here’s the URL:

http://www.cpanel.net/docs/ror/index.html

I then simply ran the script to install Ruby and configure S3 to keep the customer happy! I hope this will help someone carry on the Ruby installation.