So on and off over the last week I have been trying to get RedCloth to work in both Ruby and JRuby. Despite getting the gem I kept getting a failure when I tried to require ‘redcloth’. When I finally got Textile support working in Java before I had managed to weave the two or three lines of Textile magic the tutorials promised I shrugged and took the task off my GTD list.

Except that today my stubborn side told me to take a look at the Ruby Gems documentation after seeing an answer to a similar problem on a mailing list. Sure enough there in Chapter 3 was the explanation that you need to require Ruby Gems before the actual Gem you want to use.

Heading to irb and sure enough:

require 'rubygems'
require 'redcloth'

Does the trick and I am finally appreciating the library. Now maybe I’m slow or perhaps the same code on the RedCloth page should have included a full script that would regardless of what was in your RUBYOPT environment variable.