s3sync, Ruby 1.8.7 and Ubuntu

s3sync is a great way to transfer files to and from Amazon S3.

Installing it onto an Ubuntu 8.10 (Linux 2.6.22-11-server) system with Ruby 1.8.7 I got the error 'LoadError: no such file to load -- openssl'.

Turns out you have to fetch the library manually:

# apt-get install libopenssl-ruby

That should solve the problem. Ubuntu is great but in the server installation you are expected to install ALL the packages you need - and you don't find out what you're missing until you try and run your code. Fedora goes the other way, installing more stuff than you probably need but at least you get all the core stuff. Neither of them gets it just right.

Another gotcha is that s3sync looks for your AWS keys in Env variables AWS_ACCESS_KEY and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY as opposed to AMAZON_ACCESS_KEY, etc.