In this article I will explain how you can get RVM (Ruby Version Manager) installed on Ubuntu 12.04 Linux. First we have to make sure that we have some dependencies installed, so run the following command to take care of them.
sudo apt-get install build-essential git-core
Now we need to install RVM (Ruby Version Manager) using curl. If you do not have curl installed yet on your system, you can issue the following command
sudo apt-get install curl
To start the RVM installation run the following command
bash -s stable < <(curl -s https://raw.github.com/wayneeseguin/rvm/master/binscripts/rvm-installer)
Now we need to add a line to our bashrc file so run the following command
echo '[[ -s "/home/andre/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && source "/home/andre/.rvm/scripts/rvm"' >> ~/.bashrc # or .zshrc
Make sure to replace andre with your user name in the above command so that you will not have any issues on your system. Now run
source ~/.bashrc
# or .zshrc
To test if our installation of RVM was succesfull, we can run a command and check its output.
type rvm | head -1
If the output of the above command is equivalent to rvm is a function, then we now have a working RVM installation. Now our Ruby Version Manager is installed and we can go ahead and install all the Rubies we want. To extend this article a little more I will go over how to install an actual Ruby version and also a Ruby Gem. So here we go...
rvm install 1.9.3
The above command will install Ruby version 1.9.3 under your .rvm directory. To make the Ruby the default one we run
rvm use --default 1.9.3
Now let us install the Ruby Gem Mysql2 which is needed for mostly everything I do. It may be possible that we need some dependencies depending on your system. On my Ubuntu 12.04 installation I did not need to install the dependencies but have seen it in the wild being asked so this command might save you some headaches...
sudo apt-get install mysql-client mysql-server libmysql-ruby libmysqlclient-dev
To install the Ruby Gem Mysql2 run the following command in you Ubuntu 12.04 installation
rvm 1.9.3 do gem install mysql2
If you installed Ruby 1.9.3 then the command to install Mysql2 will be exactly like above. If you used a different version of Ruby then make sure you put the version or full Ruby name and replace 1.9.3 above with your needs.
If you need to fall back to your system's Ruby that might have been pre-installed you can use the following command:
rvm use system
UPDATE
To have your terminal behave properly with Ubuntu 12.04 after you reboot we need to set the
> Run command as login shell
setting. To do that open up a terminal by pressing CTRL+ALT+t. Once your terminal is open, right click the terminal, and click on Profiles then Profile Preferences.
Now click on the Title and Command tab. Check Run command as a login shell. Now close the window.
Now we need to do one more thing. Run the following command in the terminal:
gedit ~/.bash_profile
This will open a text editor where we will add the following two lines:
source ~/.profile source ~/.bashrc
The reason this works is because we told the terminal to start as a login shell. This fixes an issue with RVM that happens when the terminal can't recognize RVM.
