Using Ruby Enterprise Edition, gems are not installed where I would expect

Question

I have just installed Ruby Enterprise Edition and am installing some gems for it. Stock Ruby 1.8.6 is also installed on the server.

I have added /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20090201/bin to my PATH a head of /usr/bin where ruby and gem live.

which gem confirms this:

/opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20090201/bin/gem

However, when I install gems like this:

gem install some_gem

They end up in /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/ instead of /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20090201/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/.

But if I use /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20090201/bin/gem install some_gem it does go into REE's gem directory.

I don't get it. Is there some config option I have to change? I am using sudo here. Maybe that has something to do with it?

Answer 1

A solution I used to a similar problem is to set up an alias to your REE gem command.

I.e.

alias reegem='/opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20090201/bin/gem'

Answer 2

There's a good explanation of what's going on here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/257616/sudo-changes-path-why

This assumes you're using Ubuntu. sudo does change the path under ubuntu.

The gem you have in /usr/bin/ is probably a symlink to /usr/bin/gem1.8. What I did was symlink ruby-enterprise's gem to /usr/bin/ree-gem like this:

sudo ln -s /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20090201/bin/gem /usr/bin/ree-gem

then I just use:

sudo ree-gem install some_gem

to install gems specifically for ree. If you're not using the ruby 1.8.6 rubygem, you can symlink REE's gem to /usr/bin/gem instead:

sudo ln -s /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20090201/bin/gem /usr/bin/gem

Answer 3

I posted the solution I used on Ubuntu here: http://groups.google.com/group/emm-ruby/browse_thread/thread/d0c685bbd096823a#msg_effa7d6ad42c541c

There were some additional steps to get it working beyond what was described in the Ruby Enterprise Edition documentation.

Answer 4

Here's an explanation for why it's setup like this for REE: http://www.rubyenterpriseedition.com/documentation.html#%5Fhow%5Free%5Finstalls%5Fitself%5Finto%5Fthe%5Fsystem