RVM and global gems

Question

I'm running Mac OSX 10.6.4 and have installed RVM. Its been great so far, I really love the way it lets me manage having multiple versions of rails and ruby on the same machine without headaches!

However, I don't want to have to install certain gems (such as passenger) for each setup. Is there a way to share gems between gemsets? I have a [email protected] and 1.9.2@rails3, can I have gems such as passenger, mysql, and capistrano installed once and used with all versions?

Answer 1

You can create and use global gemsets with the following commands:

rvm gemset create global
rvm gemset use global

After you've created and execute use for the global gemset simply install gems as usual:

gem install mysql, passenger

Answer 2

add the the gems you want for every gemset in a "global" rvm gemset name i.e.

rvm 1.9.2@global

then project specific gemsets rvm 1.9.2@myProject will already have you're "default" gems from your global list

Answer 3

There is something called the global gemset, and it is shared between all your gemsets of a certain ruby-version. But you can't share gems between ruby-versions.

However, what you can do is create a list of gems that will be installed automatically when adding a new ruby version. That is described here. In short: edit a file called ~/.rvm/gemsets/global.gems to contain the list of gems you want to be there for each ruby-version.

Hope it helps.