Installing and using a new Ruby on Linux Mint 17

Linux Mint 17 (and its parent, Ubuntu 14.04) ships with Ruby 2.0.0. This is a pretty old version of the language, and recent versions, especially 2.2, have numerous performance improvements. Fortunately, it’s easy to install and use the latest Ruby,

thanks to a couple of shell script packages by the github user Postmodern.

ruby-install

The first step is to build and install a new Ruby, using the appropriately named ruby-install. Obtain this script using these commands:

git clone https://github.com/postmodern/ruby-install.git
cd ruby-install
sudo make install

Then it’s a simple matter to install the latest Ruby:

sudo ruby-install ruby

You can install other versions of Ruby besides the latest by specifying a version number. All of the installed Rubies will live alongside each other in /opt/rubies. But how do you select and use a particular version of ruby? That’s where chruby comes in.

chruby

The chruby shell script package is a lightweight tool that allows you to switch between your installed Rubies at any time. Obtain it using these commands:

git clone https://github.com/postmodern/chruby.git
cd chruby
sudo make install

Then add the following line to both your own .bashrc and root’s .bashrc:

source /usr/local/share/chruby/chruby.sh

The next time you start an interactive shell, chruby will scan /opt/rubies for installed Rubies. You can list the available Rubies using:

chruby

Then you can select one of the Rubies. For example:

chruby ruby-2.2.3

This will alter some environment variables (including PATH) so that the selected Ruby and related programs will be used subsequently.

Gems

It appears that most Ruby users are interested only in Rails, and will probably use bundles to install the gems required by their application. But other Ruby programs, such as the excellent email client sup, may need to be installed using system-wide gems. In this case, you can install the required gems as root after selecting the appropriate version of Ruby:

sudo su
chruby ruby-2.2.3
gem install ...