Installing Ruby and Railswith RVM on Fedora 14

Installing Ruby and Railswith RVM on Fedora 14

stored in:  Everything,  Ruby and tagged:  archlinux,  fedora,  ruby,  rvm

Installing Ruby has always been rather controversial. There are very few operating systems today that have a clean install and does not ass kick the system’s package manager. Ever since the introduction of RVM Ruby installs on Linux systems got so much easier. Today I reconfigured my workstation at home with Fedora 14, AwesomeWM and Dropbox (for config sharing across all workstations — sweet). RVM is a nice tool, but it shouldn’t be nescecary. Its nothing more than a crude hack to run multiple untested, possibly unstable Ruby versions. It saved lives during the switch to 1.9 and 1.9.2, but its not a long term solution for stable linux systems. But right now we need Ruby 1.9.2, so we will use RVM to fix that up.

On my mobile workstation I run archlinux, because battery matters, on which installing Ruby and Rails is rather painless.

$ pacman -S ruby
$ gem install rails

Done, easy, cheap shot and works like a charm and no need for RVM. Now, on to Fedora!

First we’ll install all packages RVM depends on:

$ yum install git ruby curl bison patch make


And install RVM for the current user only using RVM’s directive:

$ bash < <( curl http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/releases/rvm-install-head )


Done! Make sure you add the [[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && source "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" line to the end of your .bashrc. The skeleton /etc/bashrc does not contain any return statements, so no need to fix that. Then do a source ~/.bashrc to make sure your path is updated.

Lets install some dependencies:

# As stated by RVM
$ yum install gcc-c++ patch readline readline-devel zlib zlib-devel libyaml-devel libffi-devel iconv-devel

# And the rest most Rails apps will eventuall need
$ yum install libxslt-devel sqlite-devel openssh openssl-devel


Easy enough, lets get, compile, install and use Ruby:

$ rvm install 1.9.2
$ rvm use 1.9.2 --default


Lets install rails!

$ gem install rails


Nice! Now you can install other gems, use rake or do ruby stuff as normal  Note that if you ever need to rebuild Ruby for it to have proper bindings add the --force parameter to RVM, else it will not be recompiled, even though it says so.