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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-07T11:39:19+00:00

I would like to know about alternative ways to build a development machine for

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I would like to know about alternative ways to build a development machine for Ruby 1.9.3 on OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, that does not require Xcode.

Mountain Lion is now Golden Master as I’m writing this question, so it could be considered as final version. That cannot be said about Xcode, that is a preview release yet.

RVM recommends to install osx-gcc-installer over Xcode, but I would like not to mess my system.

What is the cleanest way to install Ruby 1.9.3 on Mountain Lion without Xcode?

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  1. Editorial Team

    osx-gcc-installer turns out to be a very good option to replace Xcode in order to install Ruby 1.9.3

    These are the steps I have followed:

    1. Download & install the latest version of osx-gcc-installer here (GCC-10.7-v2 is fine): https://github.com/kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer
    2. Install RVM as usual and select 1.9.3-head as the default ruby installation: https://rvm.io/rvm/install/
    3. Install Homebrew: https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/wiki/installation
    4. Install libksba to resolve some dependencies with Ruby 1.9.3: brew install libksba

    That’s it! You should now have Ruby 1.9.3 installed on Mountain Lion working perfectly.

    If you need some other packages, install them now through Homebrew, such as Imagemagick for example: brew install imagemagick

    It’s possible that you need XQuartz for Homebrew to work properly, as Apple is not shipping X11 since Mountain Lion. You can download it here: http://xquartz.macosforge.org/trac/wiki

    EDIT:

    Now (since 29th July) Command line tools for Xcode 4.4 are available.

    So, the new steps are these:

    1. Download & install Command line tools for Xcode 4.4 (you don’t need to download Xcode): https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action
    2. Install Homebrew: https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/wiki/installation
    3. Install automake: brew install automake
    4. Install RVM as usual and select 1.9.3-head as the default ruby installation: https://rvm.io/rvm/install/

    Optional step: You may need XQuartz for some components, for example for Imagemagick, so download & install XQuartz: http://xquartz.macosforge.org/trac/wiki

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