by on October 3, 2011
During my attempts to install Vagrant 1 on my gentoo machine I stumpled upon RVM – the ruby version manager. Using RVM you are able to maintain multiple ruby environments in parallel. So you can have i.e. ruby-1.8.7 and ruby-1.9.2 installed next to each other and switch with only a couple of commands.
The RVM installation process is explained in detail on the RVM website but I just want to sum up the steps I did on my machine.
# fetch rvm sources
$ bash < <(curl -sk https://rvm.beginrescueend.com/install/rvm)
# source rvm scripts on shell login
$ echo '[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && . "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm"' >> ~/.zshrc
# emerge required packages
$ emerge -va libiconv readline zlib openssl curl git libyaml sqlite libxslt libtool bisonNow you are ready to install and load a ruby instance of your liking:
RVM allows you to have multiple sets of RubyGems even for one single ruby version – these sets are called gemsets. A typical workflow borrowed from the RVM website looks like this:
$ rvm 1.9.2
$ gem install rails -v 2.3.3
$ rvm gemset create rails222 rails126
$ rvm 1.9.2@rails222
$ gem install rails -v 2.2.2
$ rvm 1.9.2@rails126
$ gem install rails -v 1.2.6
$ rvm 1.8.7
$ gem install rails -v 1.2.3