Gems installed to $HOME not recognized

Ruby
1

I’m using Ruby 1.9, Ubuntu (I don’t have the following problem with my
Ruby 1.8).

For some reason, Ruby 1.9 doesn’t see gems I install to $HOME. It only
sees gems I install as root.

In other words, if I do the following…

$ gem1.9.1 install haml

…the gem gets installed in ~/.gem/ruby/1.9.1/gems/haml-2.2.22, and
when I do ‘require “haml”’ ruby says there’s no such file to load.

On the other hand, when I do…

$ sudo gem1.9.1 install haml

…the gem gets installed in /var/lib/gems/1.9.1/gems/haml-2.2.22, and
doing ‘require “haml”’ works.

I temporarily solved the problem by symlinking /var/lib/gems/1.9.1 to
~/.gem/ruby/1.9.1.

My question:

How can i make Ruby 1.9 see the gems installed at ~/.gem/ruby/1.9.1 ?

2

I found that it was a lot of hassle trying to get Ruby1.9 setup on
Ubuntu,
particularly if you wanted to switch between 1.8 and 1.9.

Then I found rvm http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/ which has made the whole
process very easy to manage. I removed all my ruby packages except for
1.8
and gems then followed the installation instructions for rvm using the
gem
method.

Hope it helps you!

3

I had the same problem on Ubuntu 9.10. Setting the environment
variable GEM_HOME to the location of my gems seems to work.