rbenv: A basic introduction
Why
We have projects that have been developed using many different versions of Ruby. Since we do not want to constantly update every old project, we need to have many Ruby versions installed on our development machines.
Rbenv Archive does that for us.
How it works
Rbenv installs ruby version and ruby gems to ~/.rbenv/versions/VERSION_NUMBER/...
. This way many different Rubies can be installed at once.
When you run ruby
or gem
or bundler
or any other Ruby binary
- rbenv looks for a file
.ruby-version
in your directory (or any parent directory) - and sets your
PATH
to the correct Ruby on the fly
Installation
Check our card on installing rbenv.
Basic workflow
Choose your version
To use a specific Ruby version for your project, add a file .ruby-version
that simply contains the version you want:
Copy2.3.1
If you need to switch the version outside of a project for your current shell, you can also say
Copyrbenv shell 2.3.1
Note that this causes your shell to ignore the .ruby-version
until you close it.
Also see rbenv: How to switch to another Ruby version (temporarily, per project, or globally).
Show current version
To see the currently selected version (hopefully "2.3.1"), run
Copyrbenv version
It will warn you if the version is not currently installed.
Install a missing version
Copyrbenv install 2.3.1
You can skip the version number to install the currently selected one.
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