Installing Ruby 1.9 on OS X Leopard using /usr/local - RVM issues

I have to run a Rails (3.0.开发者_StackOverflow社区6) app locally that requires Ruby 1.9.2 (plus Mongo). I'd like to install Ruby 1.9.2 alongside my existing 1.8.7 and be able to swap between them as necessary. I prefer installing to usr/local over Macports etc. Any recommendations? I've tried installing RVM but this has proved such a pain on OS X I'd rather avoid that too.

Is there another way of running multiple Ruby versions (maybe with a prefix like this)? I only need to switch to 1.9 for this project. Or has anyone a good solution to the known OS X/RVM install issues? Specifically, on Tiger/10.4 bash doesn't support errtrace.

Update: solved with a new RVM install script: see RVM on OS X 10.4 - possible?.

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RVM really is the easiest solution, and I would highly recommend you try and work that issue out first.

The only bit of advice is to make sure you configure your PATH variable to include /usr/local/bin before everything else. In your .profile or .login (depending on your shell), you should have it towards the bottom, in case there is any other lines configuring PATH as well, and then for the Bourne shell family:

export PATH="/usr/local/bin:$PATH

or for the C shell family:

set path = (/usr/local/bin $PATH)

Running ./configure alone should make it install into /usr/local, but you can explicitly state so with ./configure --prefix=/usr/local

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Install Ruby from source and it will default to /usr/local/bin. Adjust your path, the #! line, or your /usr/local/bin/ruby source.rb as necessary to switch between Apple's installation of Ruby, and the one you add.

You can force a new base directory using ./configure --prefix=/... where '...' is whatever path you want. Again, once the files are installed, you can adjust the executing Ruby with one of the above methods.

Do not attempt to remove Apple's installed Ruby. It's there for their use, not for our convenience, and Apple uses it to provide some functionality. Messing with it or removing it could break things, and you probably wouldn't notice for a while.

RE: RVM, It really is the preferred way to install a user Ruby. I have it on two Macs, and a handful of different Linux boxes and the only time I had trouble was with a secured machine behind firewalls, but I can't blame RVM for those problems when it couldn't see the internet at all. And, yes, I got it working nicely, I just had to insert the manually downloaded Ruby archives into the ~/.rvm/archives directory.

If you are having problems and want to use it, it might help to temporarily strip your startup scripts, or create a temporary user, and see what happens. Additionally, the author has been very responsive and helpful the few times I've asked him questions. Contact him at:

If you still cannot find what an answer to your question, find me 'wayneeseguin' in #rvm on irc.freenode.net:

    http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=rvm

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If you download the source and compile it, it should install into /usr/local by default, or you can

./configure --prefix=/usr/local

just to be sure.

Actually, compiling and installing ruby from source is an easy way to be sure you have the latest version, especially if you use git and github:

https://github.com/ruby/ruby