I tried to compile IronRuby on OS X (leopard) with the dmg I downloaded from the mono website, and that didn’t work.

I then uninstalled that mono version by running monoUninstall.sh and proceeded to get mono from subversion. I’m putting these steps on my blog more for future reference when I decide to reinstall my box for some reason.

Download gettext, pkgconfig and glib2.0

extract the archives and build them in the following order gettext, pkgconfig, glib2.0

./configure --prefix=/opt/local
make
sudo make install

At this point it would be wise to set the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable. I added the following line to ~/.bash_profile

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:/opt/local/lib/pkgconfig"

next it’s time to check out the mono sources from their repositories

cd ~/
mkdir tools
mkdir mono
svn co svn://anonsvn.mono-project.com/source/trunk/mono
svn co svn://anonsvn.mono-project.com/source/trunk/mcs
svn co svn://anonsvn.mono-project.com/source/trunk/libgdiplus
svn co svn://anonsvn.mono-project.com/source/trunk/moon
svn co svn://anonsvn.mono-project.com/source/trunk/olive
svn co svn://anonsvn.mono-project.com/source/trunk/gtk-sharp

checking those out will take a while

now go into the mono directory and build mono

cd mono
./autogen.sh --prefix=/opt/local/mono --with-preview=yes --with-moonlight=yes

–with-preview enables the .NET 3.5 features that have been implemented so far –with-moonlight enables support for moonlight

make
sudo make install

This will also take some time and when it completes you can check if mono is installed by typing mono -V

That’s it for mono, now onto IronRuby

cd ~/tools
svn co http://ironruby.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk ironruby
sudo gem install pathname2
rake compile mono=1

And that should be all :)

UPDATE: I’ve got new instructions for building IronRuby