Hardscrabble 🍫

By Max Jacobson

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ruby-build, chruby, and yosemite

October 19, 2014

A few months ago I stopped using rvm to install and manage my ruby installations on my computers. I don’t have a great reason, other than reading that Steve Klabnik uses something else and I felt like trying it one day.

What I use now:

ruby-build

This is how I install rubies:

chruby

This is how I switch between versions of ruby.

setup

The instructions in the readme are good. The gist is that you install a script and then source it from your ~/.bashrc so it will be included in your shell sessions. This exposes a chruby bash function, which you can thereafter reference from the shell to switch between rubies (eg chruby 2.1.2) or even later in your ~/.bashrc, to choose a ruby immediately upon starting a shell session. This will look in the ~/.rubies folder by default, which is why I install my rubies there.

Yosemite…

So this all stopped working on my laptop yesterday when I upgraded to Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite). I couldn’t run bundle install without getting a nasty error, and I became convinced that I needed to rebuild all of my rubies. So I thought “OK, I know how to do that” and ran rm -rf ~/.rubies and set about following those steps under “ruby-build” above.

It didn’t work, so I went to sleep.

Long story short, this fix worked: https://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv/issues/610#issuecomment-58804829

Where before you would have run ruby-build 2.1.3 ~/.rubies/2.1.3, now (until ruby-build makes a fix) you can run CC=clang ruby-build 2.1.3 ~/.rubies/2.1.3.

I don’t know if rvm had this problem. I wouldn’t be surprised if they did, and it was fixed quickly. But like. It’s kind of cool to use smaller tools sometimes.

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