Question

I’m new to both Ruby and to Mac OSX, though I do have a fair amount of experience with Unix commands. I just installed Ruby 1.9 via a MacPorts command (port install ruby19). I then needed to do a find from root just to figure out where it went, which turned out to be: /opt/local/var/macports/software/ruby19/1.9.1-p376_0/opt/local/bin/ruby1.9.

The current version of Ruby (1.8.6) runs via /usr/bin/ruby, which is a symbolic link to /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/Current/usr/bin/ruby where Current is a symbolic link to a directory called 1.8.

I’d like to make Ruby 1.9 my default (along with related tools like irb), and while I can manage to do that, I’d like to know if there’s a conventional way. Should I copy or link the MacPorts path to /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.9 and then point Current to 1.9? (I’d also have rename or copy the executables: ruby1.9 to ruby, irb1.9 to irb, etc.) Or should I just blow away the /usr/bin/ruby link (and /usr/bin/irb, etc) and create new ones pointing to the MacPorts version?

Answer 1

My advice:

$ port uninstall ruby1.9

Then follow this: https://rvm.io/rvm/install/

Then:

$ rvm install 1.9.2
$ rvm --default 1.9.2

You might even rvm install macruby to toy with Cocoa.