Building opengl

Pre-requisites

General

• C compiler (not needed for binary install on Windows)
• ruby 1.9.2+
• rake
• OpenGL headers for OpenGL version 1.1 or later (not needed for binary install on Windows)

For glut:

• GLUT 3.7+ or API-compatible implementation (freeglut, OpenGLUT)

The main goal is having ruby installed and being capable of compiling native C extensions for ruby (ruby-dev), as well as having the required OpenGL libraries.

Linux

On Ubuntu or Debian systems, aside from Ruby you’ll need the ‘developer’ package ruby-dev, which supports compiling C extensions for ruby.

For OpenGL related headers you’ll need the following packages:

• libgl1-mesa-dri libgl1-mesa-dev – opengl
• libglu1-mesa libglu1-mesa-dev – glu
• freeglut3 freeglut3-dev – (free)glut

On some distributions you may need the xorg-dev developer package.

h4. ArchLinux

$ pacman -S mesa glu freeglut

Mac OS X

On OS X, you will need to install your own version of Ruby as the version that ships with OS X has known problems with properly building ruby-opengl bindings. You’ll also need XCode for gcc and tools.

Windows

For manual build on Windows you need to have platform SDK and compiler that must match the one which was used for compiling ruby binary (for One-click ruby installer it is MSVC 6.0).

If ruby was installed via the one-click installer, the DevKit is also needed (for compiling native C extensions).

Build and installation

Installing as a gem

opengl should support being installed via gems now. Just do gem install opengl and it should pull down the gem and try to build the bindings for you automatically.

For windows there is also pre-built binary windows gem available (i386-mswin32) which is compatible with the ruby one-click installer and does not need compiler or other mentioned tools installed.

Manual Build instructions for all platforms (see above for platform-specific notes)

• Make sure you have working ruby with rubygems installed and (if needed) appropriate developer packages (ruby-dev, ruby1.9-dev, …)
• Make sure you have a working C compiler
• Install rake by running gem install rake
• Make sure you have working OpenGL installation, this includes libGL, libGLU, glut and (if needed) appropriate -dev or -devel packages.
• Run rake in the root directory of the project
• (OPTIONAL) Run rake test to run unit tests to verify it works properly

Installing manually built extensions

• rake clean to clean out the project
• rake gem to create source gem from project
• gem install pkg/ruby-opengl-(version).gem to compile and install the gem
• Done.

Building binary gem (useful only for binary distribution of the project)

• Run rake binary_gem
• Binary gem will be generated in pkg/ directory

Testing

To run unit tests:

$ rake test

Note that the tests have the adverse effect of testing the underlying OpenGL implementation, so depending on your GL provider, drivers or OS, the tests may fail, crash, or not run at all, without affecting your ability to use the bindings.

Running programs and examples

To run a sample file, make sure the ruby-opengl gem is installed then:

$ cd examples
$ ruby -rubygems plane.rb