Notes: Customizing My Ruby Environment on OS X

July 05, 2015 · Post

This post is as much a note for myself as it is sharing my setup and experiences with others.

It all started with wanting to fork @jglovier’s gifs repo and roll my own gif library. Once I cloned locally, I needed to compile and run the Jekyll-based project so I could re-theme it… And found that it uses Gems that I don’t have installed. Pretty quickly I ended up getting messages like this:

/Library/Ruby/Gems/2.0.0/gems/bundler-1.8.3/lib/bundler/spec_set.rb:92:in `block in materialize': Could not find RedCloth-4.2.9 in any of the sources (Bundler::GemNotFound)
	from /Library/Ruby/Gems/2.0.0/gems/bundler-1.8.3/lib/bundler/spec_set.rb:85:in `map!'
  ...

Mind you, this is happening even though RedCloth is installed. Oh, wait, I’m lazy and installed all of my Gems via Sudo.

So, I decided to try and jump into using rbenv again, since installing Gems using the Sudo command aren’t working, and I’m treading on ground I don’t completely understand (Sudo–Ruby–OS X). I started by installing Homebrew, then ran the Homebrew install instructions on the rbenv repo.

Once that was complete, I used brew doctor to find I had some problems and cleaned them up. After that, I dug around on the nets to find what I needed to set up my ~/.bash_profile properly so that when I open Terminal, it loads up the version of Ruby I have installed with rbenv. Here’s what I have working currently:

# Fix $PATH for homebrew
homebrew=/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin
export PATH=$homebrew:$PATH

# Initialize rbenv
if which rbenv > /dev/null; then eval "$(rbenv init -)"; fi

Next, I installed a version of Ruby using rbenv rbenv install 2.0.0-p645, and set it to be my global Ruby setup with rbenv global 2.0.0-p645.

I quit and restarted Terminal, and checked the Ruby version with ruby --version. Terminal came back with the version I installed with rbenv. If Terminal doesn’t say the version of Ruby installed with rbenv, something isn’t working right with the ~./bash_profile. Now, when I install Gems, I don’t need Sudo, and everything is working peachy.

Notes:

  • Your .bash_profile must be installed at ~/, which is the home folder of your account. At the time of writing this, I’m using a MacBookPro10,1 running OS X 10.10.3.
  • Some of my reference material was found on Robert Anderson’s blog.