Ubuntu unable to locate package libyaml

Question

Ubuntu 20.04. Trying to install Ruby 3.2.2 I get the following error:

/tmp/ruby-build.20230911110842.25159.uzwoaP/ruby-3.2.2/lib/yaml.rb:3: warning: It seems your ruby installation is missing psych (for YAML output).
To eliminate this warning, please install libyaml and reinstall your ruby.

So I go on and run:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libyaml

But I get the following output:

E: Unable to locate package libyaml

What's wrong?

Answer 1

Indeed, it seems that there's no package named libyaml on Ubuntu 20.04.

Some packages that might possibly solve your dependency:

• libyaml-libyaml-perl (original implementation afaik)
• libyaml-0-2 (faster C++ implementation)

Answer 2

The error message suggests that the package libyaml is not available in the Ubuntu repositories, which is why apt-get is unable to locate it. However, the package you're looking for is actually named libyaml-dev.

You can install it using the following command:

sudo apt-get install libyaml-dev

After installing libyaml-dev, you should reinstall Ruby. If you're using rbenv and ruby-build, you can do this with the following command:

rbenv install 3.2.2

This should be it.