Install Ruby with gem support on Red Hat® Enterprise Linux

This post is heavily influenced by http://collectiveidea.com/blog/archives/2011/10/31/install-ruby-193-with-libyaml-on-centos/, so all credit to that author.

The problem

Installing a Ruby gem with gem install on  Red Hat® Enterprise Linux 6.8 returns errors indicating problems with libyaml:

gem install bundler

/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/yaml.rb:84:in `<top (required)>':

It seems your ruby installation is missing psych (for YAML output).

To eliminate this warning, please install libyaml and reinstall your ruby.

The investigation

Trying to reinstall libyaml and libyaml-devel followed by a reinstall of ruby did not solve the issue.

The solution

After investigating this issue for a while, and not able to solve it through yum, I considered to either install and use rvm for this, or to download and compile the source. I found  http://collectiveidea.com/blog/archives/2011/10/31/install-ruby-193-with-libyaml-on-centos/ where the author had good success with the latter, so I did the same, but cleaning up all by Ruby and libyaml stuff from yum first:

yum remove -y ruby libyaml libyaml-devel rubygem-rake rubygems rubygems-devel

# Download and install libyaml

cd /tmp

wget http://pyyaml.org/download/libyaml/yaml-0.1.7.tar.gz

tar xzvf yaml-0.1.7.tar.gz

cd yaml-0.1.7

./configure --prefix=/usr/local

make

make install

# Download and install Ruby

cd /tmp
wget http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/2.3/ruby-2.3.1.tar.gz
tar xzvf ruby-2.3.1.tar.gz
cd ruby-2.3.1
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --enable-shared --disable-install-doc --with-opt-dir=/usr/local/lib
make install

# Install your gems

gem install bundler