Cha-Cha-Cha-Chruby
Author: John on November 17, 2014
[Note: After spending some time using chruby, I ended up going back to RVM.]
Recently I got a bug, ney rather an itch I needed to scratch. I have been using RVM for over a year and half. I have had some issues, but mostly those were due to me learning how to work with RVM.
I was having an odd issue on one of my Macs so I decided to remove RVM and install rbenv. I shot a tweet out to see if anyone had an opinion about rbenv and I received a reply suggesting I give chruby a chance. Recently I had listened to an episode of Ruby Rogues #169, where they talked about RVM, rbenv, and chruby.
So I decied to give chruby a try. Removing RVM is pretty straight forward. You should be able to simply run:
rvm implode
Once removed, you may need to edit your .bashrc/.zshrc or *profile file(s) to remove any reference to RVM.
While I really like RVM, I've always been a bit worried about the magic it performs - the stuff it does for me that I'm not familiar with. Chruby seemed to be easier for me to grasp. From my limited understanding, there seems to be less moving parts in chruby vs. RVM.
I'm not going to lay out all of the steps to get chruby installed. The source web pages for chruby and ruby-install are very easy to read and comprehend.
It took me a little bit to understand the differences of chruby and how I would use in my environment. But after getting it running on my laptop, I converted two other Macs, my Ubuntu VM, and my CentOS server to use chruby.
As I said earlier, I do like RVM, and it had served me well. I still use RVM at my day job on our CentOS servers. I thought changing from RVM to chruby on those servers would be a good idea, so I attempted to change a development server. While the removal of RVM and install of Chruby went fine, I ran into a huge issue. I could not get Passenger to work properly under Chruby. I'm sure the reason is due to my lack of understanding, but I just couldn't afford to figure it out. So I switched back to RVM - and RVM will stay on our work servers.
Learn Something New Every Day
Last Edited by: John on November 11, 2015