**UPDATE: It seems there was enough clamor over the unannounced change that a reversion to HTTP was warranted. The advice below isn’t needed currently, but may become relevant in the future, should HTTPS end up back in the mix without a suitable workaround.**
Rubyists have been dropping by #rubygems this morning experiencing issues with jRuby and `gem install`. The issue is related to Rubygems.org’s switch to forcing HTTPS on connections to their Gem repository. Specifically, there is a recursive issue with jruby-openssl when trying to install Gems from Rubygems.org: you need jruby-openssl to install jruby-openssl.
If you attempt to install a Gem in any version of jRuby prior to 1.7 that doesn’t already have jruby-openssl installed, you will receive a `LoadError` error that looks something like this:
Exception `LoadError’ at /home/username/.rubies/jruby-1.5.1/lib/ruby/site_ruby/shared/jruby/openssl/autoloads/ssl.rb:8 – OpenSSL::SSL requires the jruby-openssl gem
The trouble is, you’ll get this message even if you’re trying to install the jruby-openssl gem. Uh oh.
The root of the problem is owed to two factors
1. Prior to jRuby 1.7, OpenSSL support was not included in jRuby core because of crypto export constraints
2. Rubygems.org recently switched to forcing HTTPS as a means of increasing security in the rubygems ecosystem
The jRuby devs have worked through the crypto export issue, so updating to jRuby 1.7 will solve the problem; you no longer need jruby-openssl, period. If you’re stuck on an older version of jRuby and need to get `gem install` working again, you can use this horrible, hacky work around:
Download the jruby-openssl .gem file (using something like wget/curl) and install it from the local file like so:
wget http://production.cf.rubygems.org/gems/jruby-openssl-0.7.7.gem
gem install –local ./jruby-openssl-0.7.7.gem
Be sure to replace the version number with one compatible with your version of jRuby. Also, understand that there are no guarantees that the URL schema above will remain in place. Rubygems are an API, so the implementation may change. The long term solution is to move to jRuby 1.7.