Setting up TokyoCabinet and Ruby 27 Jun 2009

I ran into a couple weirdnesses setting up tokyocabinet and the Ruby API, so am adding this to my external memory. Hopefully it will help anyone else bumping into the same issue.

Assuming you install tokyocabinet at a non-standard location, such as /Users/brianm/.opt/tokyocabinet-1.4.27 and then want to build the ruby bindings for it via a gem, the trick is to add the bin/ directory for the tokyocabinet install dir to your $PATH (in my case, that is just export PATH=/users/brianm/.opt/tokyocabinet-1.4.27/bin:$PATH). The ruby API’s extconf.rb shells out to tc’s tcucodec to find paths to libraries, etc. Alternately you could modify the extconf.rb, which is very short and sweet, but I hate doing that for aesthetic reasons.

To build the gem, you need to build via extconf but not install. After the build, use the normal gem tokyocabinet.gemspec command to build a gem. Install the gem (in my case, via rip) and glod’s your uncle.

Now to figure out if anyone has done a convenience API wrapper around the table database in TC…