Rob Seaman

I just recently built and installed three different Ruby versions (see Installing Ruby 1.8.6, 1.8.7 and 1.9 on Leopard). Following that I wanted to do some benchmark testing between 1.8 and 1.9 on a separate project so I began to use ZenTest's multiruby. It worked great for the benchmarking and I started to think about how to use multiruby as a way to manage and switch between Ruby installations. As I started looking into it I came across Dr Nic's Future proofing your Ruby code. Ruby 1.9.1 is coming post, which turned on the rest of the lights for me. The Dr Nic post does a nice job of describing how to use multiruby including setting up specific Ruby versions, adding gem support and using it with sake tasks. I'll cover some of the same setup and usage information so that this post stands alone but I won't repeat it all so I recommend you read Dr Nic's post. In addition I'll provide information about how to overcome a RubyGems installation issue that I encountered and how to use the multiruby Ruby installations as a way to dynamically switch between Ruby versions. I'll also discuss how the static build and install from source approach used in Installing Ruby 1.8.6, 1.8.7 and 1.9 on Leopard could be modified to be provide a non-multiruby dependent way to do Ruby version switching. At the end of the post I'll mention using symlinks as an alternative and how that approach could be used with multiruby. Read the rest of this entry

Dec. 19, 2008 Update: This post covers setting up and switching the default Ruby installation in /usr/local. If you're looking for a more dynamic way to test and/or switch between Ruby versions see Switching Between Ruby 1.8 & 1.9 with multiruby.

I had originally installed Ruby 1.8.6 on Tiger from source using Dan Benjamin's Building Ruby, Rails, Subversion, Mongrel, and MySQL on Mac OS X instructions. I upgraded to Leopard but continued to run the /usr/local version of Ruby. It has been working fine for me but for various reasons I decided it was time to upgrade to 1.8.7. I was happy to see Dan had created updated instructions for Leopard in his Installing Ruby, Rubygems, Rails, and Mongrel on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) post. So I decided that I'd just install over my 1.8.6 version. It didn't go off without a hitch, I ran into a problem compiling readline. This post documents what worked to resolve the problem, my journey back to 1.8.6, how to add 1.9 support and how to switch between versions. Read the rest of this entry