Installing and getting started with ultraviolet

Here is how I got the ultraviolet gem installed.

Install to heroku

Getting ultraviolet working on heroku is a snap. The required dependencies are in the default gemset.

All you have to do to get ultraviolet installed for your heroku app is to add a line ultraviolet to the .gems file at the root of your project. (You may have to create the file.)

Install at Home

The ultraviolet gem requires the textpow gem which in turn requires the oniguruma library and gem. Instalition often isn’t as easy as for the majority of gems but it isn’t too bad. This article should get you going.

The solutions described on this page were done on OS X 10.5.8 using rvm for rubies. I assume you are using a newer version of rubygems. (If you are using rvm then you should be all set.) If you still have an old version you should probably update rubygems.

A Quick Note About RVM

Ruby Version Manager (RVM) lets you install multiple versions of ruby and smoothly switch between them, complete with gemsets. I really like rvm: it does handy things like

rvm gem install gemname

rvm tests

Regardless of what ruby version we are using we still need the oniguruma library, so lets get that installed…

Installing oniguruma

Run these commands in your shell. If you find that there is a newer version you can probably replace the version numbers.

cd ~/Downloads
curl "http://www.geocities.jp/kosako3/oniguruma/archive/onig-5.9.2.tar.gz" > onig-5.9.2.tar.gz
tar xzvf onig-5.9.2.tar.gz
cd onig-5.9.2
./configure && make && sudo make install

Installing ultraviolet

For 1.8.6 & 1.8.7

gem install ultraviolet

sudo gem install ultraviolet

for 1.9.1

gem install spox-ultraviolet

sudo gem install spox-ultraviolet

The command line executible ‘uv’ for 1.9.1 was a bit noisy for me (spits out lots of warnings) but still performs.

Fixing the name error for YAML in theme2xhtmlrender

The theme2xhtmlrender command that comes with ultraviolet didn’t work out of the box for me. It was failing with a name error for YAML. Hopefully this will get fixed in the next version as the following monkey patch will probably get overwritten if you update the gem.

To fix the name error for YAML you can edit the theme2xhtmlrender file in the gems bin directory. If you are using multiple rubies (rvm) then you have to do this for each version to which you installed ultraviolet.

The locations for me are:

(1.8) => $GEM_HOME/gems/spox-ultraviolet-0.10.4/bin/theme2xhtmlrender
(1.9) => $GEM_HOME/gems/ultraviolet-0.10.2/bin/theme2xhtmlrender

Change the part that looks like this:

language: 'ruby'
begin
   require 'plist'
rescue LoadError
   require 'rubygems'
   require 'plist'
end

language: 'ruby'
begin
   require 'plist'
   require 'yaml'
rescue LoadError
   require 'rubygems'
   require 'plist'
   require 'yaml'
end

Adding a Custom TextMate Theme

If you have edited a TextMate theme or created one from scratch you probably want to add that to the list of available themes in ultraviolet. By default (on my system anyway) TextMate stores the themes you edit or create in ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Themes.

The theme I use the most is named cobaltCS which I based on the preloaded cobalt theme. So to add my theme I run the following shell command:

theme2xhtmlrender ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Themes/cobaltCS

We can check if the theme is now available.

uv --list themes

Adding a Custom Language

I have not yet added a custom language. I will update this if it takes any tinkering.

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