Phusion Passenger on Ubuntu 8.10: how to setup gem directory and users?

Question

I am actually running phusion passenger on ubuntu for a while. today i updated Ruby Enterprise Edition to the latest version - now it seems i have to reinstall all the gems that were installed on the system. so here are my questions

• what is the best way to setup phusion passenger and ruby enterprise edition to easily maintain gems afterwards, even if a new Ruby Enterprise Edition gets released?
• should gems be installed from the root user or from a system user (user .gem directory) - what would be the best practice here?

Answer 1

i now did the following to make maintainability more easy on my system (any comments welcome, as i am not sure if that is the best practice)

• uninstall all gems as the root user: gem list --no-versions | xargs gem uninstall -a -I
• install passenger as root user (via /opt/REE/bin/gem install passenger ) - i also had to install 'rake'
• made a symlink from /opt/REE to the latest ruby enterprise version dir
• run /opt/REE/bin/passenger-install-apache2-module as the root user
• added the loadmodule directives to /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

• create a user phusion passenger runs under and change his path to 1) ruby system binary directory 2) user specific gem binary directory

  PATH=$PATH:/home//.gem/ruby/1.8/bin:/opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-2010.01/bin

(i changed that settings in .bash_profile and switch to the user with su username -l ) most of the gems i maintain now within the packages (frozen). except rails, which is installed on the system.

• last step: re-installed all the gems as gem user; saved all gem names in a txtfile before via gem list --no-version > gems.txt and automatically reinstalling them (see http://www.blog.railshouse.com/2009/03/12/Re-installing-all-gems-automatically for more info)

is there anoter (better) way? how are other people doing this kind of system maintainance?

Answer 2

I wonder if you could use GEM_HOME like jruby does? I haven't tried it but it seems that it would be elegant.