rvm and how to install it on ubuntu 10.4 lucid lynx

RVM (Ruby Version Manger) is an awesome tool which allows you to manage different versions of ruby on the same machine. I’ve worked in the .net world for quite some time. And coming into ruby I was very frustrated with the fact that I couldn’t have multiple versions of ruby or that of rails. This made playing around with edge stuff a PITA. In .net I would be able to install different versions of the framework side by side and not having that in ruby or rails was really frustrating.

Enter RVM a tool to manage different ruby installations, the ruby story gets better than the .net stuff :) With RVM you can not only install different versions of ruby but also different patch levels of ruby. So, now you can have ruby 1.8.7 patchlevel 249, and ruby 1.8.7 patchlevel 299 happily working off your computer.

Alright, so you’ve decided to install rvm on your ubuntu (lucid lynx) box. There are a a lot of good tutorials on how to do this. Installing RVM is the one on the rvm website, Setup Ruby and Rails is a good one which actually tells you how to install rails and stuff with RVM. I did the following stuff to get it working on my machine.

  1. Do a fresh installation of ubuntu lucid lynx and install a basic version of ruby using apt-get. You might already have a computer with ruby installed if that’s the case you don’t need anything for the first step.

  2. Run the following on your bash prompt to install a few libraries which are needed by rvm to compile ruby

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sudo apt-get install curl git-core bison build-essential zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libreadline6-dev libxml2-dev autoconf libxslt1-dev libpq-dev postgresql
  1. Install RVM by running the following:
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bash < <( curl http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/releases/rvm-install-head )
  1. Fix your .bashrc.
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 #replace the following which is usually found on line 6
 [ -z "$PS1" ] && return
# with 
if [[ ! -z "$PS1" ]] ; then
# also put the following line at the end of the file
[[ -s $HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm ]] && source $HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm
fi
  1. Finally change the ownership of “~/.gem” using sudo chown minhajuddin /home/minhajuddin/.gems

Now you should be able to install new versions of rvm using rvm install ruby<version> like rvm install ruby-1.9.2 and change the rvm version using rvm use ruby-1.9.2

RVM is a just the right amount of crazy which was needed in the ruby world at this point of time. And if you find it useful please donate some dough to the guys working on RVM, they are making the lives of a lot of guys like us more enjoyable.

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