RVM is a version manager for the Ruby programming language, letting you install, run, and default to different versions of the language on the same computer. Ruby 1.8.7 is built-in on OSX Lion and I’m running a few programs that depend on it, but 1.8.7 is several years old and about to be deprecated – if I want to learn some Ruby, I should probably use a more recent version like 2.0.0.
So that’s where RVM comes in. Since I’m a slightly doofus-y beginner and installations can differ according to terminal shell configurations, setting it up took some muddling through. These are breadcrumbs for me rather than instructions for anyone else; if you’re trying to get started with RVM, you should use the official installation guide. But if you’re on Lion and getting the error rvm: command not found after install, you might try step two below.
In terminal, install the latest stable release:
\curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable
You may or may not have a .bash_profile in your root directory. Since the filename starts with a dot, it’s invisible by default; you can view hidden files in a given directory with
ls -a
If you have a .bash_profile, you’ll need to update it so your shell can find RVM:
echo "source $HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" >> ~/.bash_profile
In theory, you’ve got RVM powers now. I started to install Ruby 2.0.0
rvm install 2.0.0
but got an error – RVM needed lots of missing packages to complete the install. I had to enable autolib so RVM could take care of those:
rvm autolibs enable
Ran the install prompt again and that did it. Hurrah!