This beginner's guide is based on the fantastic post titled 'Ubuntu, Ruby, RVM, Rails, and You' by Ryan Bigg (@ryanbigg).
At this time, I would also like to thank Wayne E. Seguin (@wayneeseguin) for his fantastic work on RVM and Deryl (@deryldoucette) for his advice!
Ubuntu 'Lucid' 10.04 LTS Housekeeping
First, run sudo apt-get update to fetch the latest sources followed by sudo apt-get upgrade thereby upgrading your install of Ubuntu.
You are strongly advised to edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and secure your server, especially its OpenSSH daemon's configuration. Details on setting up public and private SSH keys are detailed here.
Next, let's install Git, a distributed version control system (DVCS), curl, as well as the build-essential package — these are prerequisites for installing RVM, amongst others. Proceed with the following command
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential git-core curl
Install RVM
Let's perform a system wide install of RVM
$ curl -L get.rvm.io | sudo bash -s stable
You should be left with the following details and instructions post-install.
Installing RVM to /usr/local/rvm/
Creating RVM system user group 'rvm'
# RVM: Shell scripts enabling management of multiple ruby environments.
# RTFM: https://rvm.io/
# HELP: http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=rvm (#rvm on irc.freenode.net)
# Cheatsheet: http://cheat.errtheblog.com/s/rvm/
# Screencast: http://screencasts.org/episodes/how-to-use-rvm
# In case of any issues read output of 'rvm requirements' and/or 'rvm notes'
Installation of RVM in /usr/local/rvm/ is almost complete:
* First you need to add all users that will be using rvm to 'rvm' group,
and logout - login again, anyone using rvm will be operating with `umask g+w`.
* To start using RVM you need to run `source /etc/profile.d/rvm.sh`
in all your open shell windows, in rare cases you need to reopen all shell windows.
# mike,
#
# Thank you for using RVM!
# I sincerely hope that RVM helps to make your life easier and more enjoyable!!!
#
# ~Wayne
rvm 1.12.3 (stable) by Wayne E. Seguin <[email protected]>, Michal Papis <[email protected]
om> [https://rvm.io/]
As per the above let's add the current user to the rvm group
$ usermod -a -G rvm mike
Ensure you logout and back in to your account for changes to take effect. This will always automatically perform source /etc/profile.d/rvm.sh thereby loading rvm into your current session.
We need to add the following line to .bashrc to ensure RVM will be setup in our bash session during future logins
$ echo '[[ -s "/usr/local/rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && source "/usr/local/rvm/scripts/rvm"' >> ~/.bashrc
You can either logout and back, or for convenience sake simply reload the file via source .bashrc, thereby ensuring the above changes take effect.
Before we set about installing Ruby, let's install some packages to ensure our Ruby lives are as pain free as possible — you can get the following list by performing rvm requirements.
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential openssl libreadline6 libreadline6-dev curl
git-core zlib1g zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libyaml-dev libsqlite3-0 libsqlite3-dev
sqlite3 libxml2-dev libxslt-dev autoconf libc6-dev ncurses-dev automake libtool
bison subversion
You are also urged to look at rvm notes as well for OS specific notes. Great! We are now ready to install Ruby via RVM.
Install Ruby
Proceed to install Ruby 1.9.3, or any other version as you require, via rvm install 1.9.3. Notice that I have not specified a particular patch-level and therefore RVM will fetch the latest patch level for ruby 1.9.3.
Let's confirm the install went well
$ rvm list
rvm rubies
ruby-1.9.3-p125 [ x86_64 ]
# Default ruby not set. Try 'rvm alias create default <ruby>'.
# => - current
# =* - current && default
# * - default
As seen above, ruby-1.9.3-p125 has been compiled as is available for use via rvm. Let's make this our default version of Ruby
$ rvm use 1.9.3 --default && rvm list
Using /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p125
rvm rubies
=* ruby-1.9.3-p125 [ x86_64 ]
# => - current
# =* - current && default
# * - default
Performing ruby -v also confirms this with its response of ruby 1.9.3p125 (2012-02-16 revision 34643) [x86_64-darwin11.3.0]
Fantastic! We've configured and successfully setup ruby-1.9.3-p125 as the default Ruby via RVM.