Installing gems for a single user

Ruby
1

I’m used to using gems locally where I can install them systemwide. But
in a shared hosting environment, where there might be several systemwide
gems installed by the host, there may be gems I want to install just in
my home directory. Does RubyGems support this? In a way that your Ruby
program can access both the systemwide and local gems?

Thanks!

Jen

2

On Fri, Jul 14, 2006 at 12:43:03AM +0900, jennyw wrote:

I’m used to using gems locally where I can install them systemwide. But
in a shared hosting environment, where there might be several systemwide
gems installed by the host, there may be gems I want to install just in
my home directory. Does RubyGems support this? In a way that your Ruby
program can access both the systemwide and local gems?

Sure:

mkdir ~/.gems
export GEM_HOME=/home/jennyw/.gems
wget http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/sources/rubyforge-0.0.1.gem
gem install rubyforge-0.0.1.gem

And you should be able to gem list, gem install, etc.

In scripts where you don’t have control over the environment and
RubyGems is
already loaded, use:

Gem.use_paths(“/home/jennyw/.gems”)

For other concrete examples, you might scan:
http://balloon.hobix.com/lib/balloon.rb

_why

3

jennyw wrote:

I’m used to using gems locally where I can install them systemwide. But
in a shared hosting environment, where there might be several systemwide
gems installed by the host, there may be gems I want to install just in
my home directory. Does RubyGems support this? In a way that your Ruby
program can access both the systemwide and local gems?

My solution: compile and install Ruby in ~/software (or similar) and
use that Ruby for everything, including gems. No permission
problems.

Gavin