I am working on a small screen-scraping utility written in Ruby, and since I have been working previously with RubyfulSoup, I wanted to give WWW::Mechanize a try this time.

So i have installed the WWW::mechanize gem:

sudo gem install mechanize

I wanted to try a ‘Hello world’ application first, to see wheter it works. Here are some official examples (click on ‘Examples’). I Copy&pasted the first one, run and got the following error:

/usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:21:in
`require__': no such file to load -- net/https (LoadError)
from /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:21:in `require'
from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mechanize-0.4.4/lib/mechanize.rb:15
...
...

After some googling i have found the answer: I had to install libopenssl-ruby, and the error was gone.

I wonder if you have to install this amount of additional packages on other distributions also? From the time I am using Ruby/Rails I did not have other distro than Ubuntu, but back in my Python days I have been running on gentoo and I don’t remember such problems. Ubuntu is really very cool, but it seems you have to know well which packages do you need and install them manually when it comes to coding/development…

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 16th, 2006 at 7:29 am and is filed under Ruby, Ubuntu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.