This manual explains how to install the most recent stable version of Ruby on Linux, without using or alternative version managers. The goal was to find a fast and reliable approach for provisioning expendable virtual machines for Rails development environment. rbenv Basic assumptions: Installation speed matters. Only one version of Ruby is required system-wide. We're using Ubuntu, or any other Debian-based Linux distribution. Step 1. Install prebuilt Ruby from Brightbox Notice the package that should be installed in addition to the primary one. It is required to build native extensions for Ruby gems. dev sudo apt-get install software-properties-common sudo apt-add-repository ppa:brightbox/ruby-ng sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install ruby2.6 ruby2.6-dev Brightbox manual proposes a tool called that can help to switch between multiple Rubies on the same system. Since there will be only one of them, this step is unnecessary. ruby-switch Step 2. Make gem work without sudo By default, will try to install new gems to the system folder (e.g. ), which is no good. Ruby version managers override this path with something under user home directory. But the same operation could be done manually. To permanently set target directory to the user home, and these lines to your : gem /var/lib/gems/2.4.0 ~/.bashrc GEM_HOME= /.gem/ruby/2.6.0 PATH= /.gem/ruby/2.6.0/bin: export $HOME export $HOME $PATH Here is the most important thing you need to know about Ruby version managers to understand what exactly they do in system configuration: "RubyGems' default local repository can be overridden with the and environment variables. sets the default repository to install into. allows multiple local repositories to be searched for gems" — ( ) GEM_PATH GEM_HOME GEM_HOME GEM_PATH rubygems.org Step 3. Run a quick ad-hoc test Log into the shell, and execute these commands to ensure and binaries are available, gem home path is configured correctly, and native extensions could be built: gem ruby gem install bundler rails rails new testapp cd Or just execute to see the paths without installing anything. gem env Here is a full to provision new Linux VM with Ruby development environment: Vagrantfile https://github.com/dreikanter/vagrant-rails Peace ✌️
