rbenv[1] makes installing and managing Ruby pretty damn straightforward, at least on *nix. Once you have Ruby itself up and running, installing any needed Gems is child's play.
Does this also apply to end-users of Ruby apps that are just an apt-get away? I don't really want to learn all that stuff (and remember to redo it on all installs) just to use some tool that happens to be written in Ruby.
You CAN use apt-get to install ruby packages. But it totally totally sucks.
(And as for the Ubuntu thing. I keep around the tarball with the ruby gem source, and have a script that scps, untars, and runs the install script. I have to type in the root password, but thats about it. Its definitely not ideal, but there are worse things ;))
Good point. Hopefully the Homebrew installer script will bootstrap this for you. They already build and distribute binary packages, they probably can easily download the existing Ruby package and execute it.
I support Ruby apps so Ruby is on every server anyways.
With that said you can use Omnibus Chef Installer now which includes a copy of Ruby just for Chef. Good for servers where you don't need Ruby or small servers that would take awhile to compile a newer Ruby.
Annoyingly, Homebrew installation (one of the best ways to get these scripting languages installed) assumes you already have Ruby installed. I wonder if they’ll finally rewrite the install script in pure Bash.
I guess it depends on what you're writing. Using rbenv and bundler keeps ruby apps in check, but if you want to install a whole load of stuff, you could take a look at Vagrant (http://www.vagrantup.com).
Interesting concept.
Coincidentally, I wrote a gem recently that serves the same function as the git-overwritten script at the end:
https://github.com/ilyakava/stefon
I agree. This would be far more awesome if you could install it with a fucking shell script. It is called fucking shell scripts. Not fucking ruby scripts.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chef_(software)
reply