rbenv is a nice light-weight tool to switch between different ruby-versions. It’s cool because we can also create a directory with a ruby-installation in it and install all our modules inside this installation-directory. In that way we don’t have to mix our system-ruby-installation with some gem-modules.
rbenv is easily to install on debian-systems:
apt-get update && apt-get install rbenv
Now we can download the sources of ruby, compile it and install it into a custom installationdir:
./configure --prefix=$HOME/.rbenv/versions/2.1.3
make
make install
Or we just install a ruby-version via ruby-build:
ruby-build 1.9.2-p290 $HOME/.rbenv/versions/2.1.3
Now let’s rehash rubyenv:
rbenv rehash
We need to initialise rbenv if we open a shell, so lets put the following line to our $HOME/.bash_profile:
eval "$(rbenv init -)"
We could change our global ruby-version to our freshly build 2.1.3-version:
dr@tardis> rbenv global 2.1.3
So let’s open a new shell and check our ruby-versions:
dr@tardis> rbenv versions
system
* 2.1.3 (set by /home/dr/.ruby-version)
Now we are using our custom ruby-version:
dr@tardis> ruby --version
ruby 2.1.3p242 (2014-09-19 revision 47630) [x86_64-linux]
If we install gem-modules, they will be installed in our custom ruby-directory.
I really love this tool. It’s simple and it helps a lot. For further informations please check out the website of this project: https://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv/blob/master/README.md The documentation there is very good!
