Ruby 1.8.6 / 1.8.7 living side-by-side
With the most recent update of OSX, Apple did not update Ruby from 1.8.6 to 1.8.7 even though there are significant improvements incorporated into the new version. I decided that instead of waiting for Apple to update my default Ruby install, I would do it myself. My goal was to keep the default Apple Ruby install of 1.8.6 alone and install 1.8.7 through MacPorts. That was the easy part.
[code language="shell"]$ sudo port install ruby
$ sudo port install rb-rubygems[/code]
This will give you both ruby and a rubygems install. The way to make this installation the default is to adjust your PATH to have /opt/local/bin/ as the first item in your PATH definition (which is set in ~/.bash_profile).
[code language="shell"]PATH=/opt/local/bin:$PATH[/code]
Then reload your terminal or execute:
[code language="shell"]$ source ~/.bash_profile[/code]
Now here comes a nicety that many people will really appreciate. We want both version of Ruby to share the same gems! This is simply set (adjust paths accordingly if your not on OSX 10.5) the following inside your .bash_profile.
[code language="shell"]export GEM_HOME=`/usr/bin/gem env home`
export GEM_PATH=`/usr/bin/gem env path`[/code]
Make sure you use ` marks and not ‘ or “. This will use your 1.8.6 ruby gems as the source for your ruby gems. There you go, now you have two versions of Ruby living side by side in harmony, its so beautiful it brings a tear to my eye.
The goal of this is that you can leave the Apple install alone and if you ever want new (more current) ruby versions, you can just issue an update command via MacPorts. Thanks to drbrain for the help on troubleshooting this setup.
August 13th, 2008 at 11:19 pm
Beautimus! Just what I was looking for.
I’ll be sure to shed a tear for you too.