Ruby Environment Setup.md

Ruby Environment Setup

How to properly setup your Ruby environment using rbenv.

Purpose

Using some sort of Ruby version management is highly recommended as opposed to using the system version of Ruby (which often requires sudo access to install dependencies).

Installing rbenv

1. Install Homebrew if it's not already installed:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)""

2. Install rbenv:

brew install rbenv

3. Initilaize rbenv:

rbenv init

NOTE: Don't forget to also add eval "$(rbenv init -)" to your ~/.bash_profile, as suggested by the output of the above command.

4. Install a current version of Ruby:

rbenv install 2.6.3

NOTE: You can use the rbenv install --list command to list available Ruby versions.

5. Configure rbenv to use the newer version of Ruby:

rbenv global 2.6.3

6. Reload your ~/.bash_profile (or restart Terminal):

source ~/.bash_profile

7. If on macOS Catalina and using Zsh (Z shell), you may encounter a write permissions error. Here's how to fix it.

Add the following to .zshenv:

export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"

Add the following lines to .zshrc:

source $HOME/.zshenv
eval "$(rbenv init - zsh)"

Restart terminal.

References

The information in this guide is based on this excellent article by Jason Charnes.

The information for installing rbenv on Zsh is this article by Antonio Cangiano.