Ruby on iPhone (sorta).

This deserves some explanation. I posted this on my facebook account and people where like, ‘whaaa?’. It looks crazier than it is and I really haven’t found too much application for it especially since typing all the ‘([*>=’ characters can get annoying before it gets practical. Still it is fun, and irb works which is nice for testing things quickly.

Simple Steps:

1) Default iPhones have their arms tied and are not fun hacker toys until they are ‘freed’. The brave can start here http://www.quickpwn.com/ but make sure everything is backed up so you can recover if things go wrong.

2) Read this: http://www.saurik.com/id/1 it is the story of how a guy ported Debian apt-get to the iPhone, put a friendly face on it with UIKit (called Cydia). You can add package sources to apt-get and install new stuff either through the command line ‘apt-get install ruby’ (as root) OR just use Cydia (it’s simple and nice, you can uninstall stuff and update packages with it too). You can install Cydia by using QuickPwn then look for Ruby under Browse > Scripting.

3) I already gave it away but you can ‘apt-get install ruby’ (as root) with the Terminal app.

4) Test it. ‘ruby -v’.

A Short Example:

1) Type ‘irb’ to invoke Ruby’s interactive interpreter.

2) Try a simple script using ‘open-uri’.

» require ‘open-uri’

» page = open “http://ghettochip.com”

» puts page.readlines

3) Think of cool stuff you can do with Ruby on your iPhone and push this further.