I'm having trouble imagining who this is for, at least in the context of an RVM replacement. The point of RVM is convenience. It's like RVM, only without most of the convenience (gemsets, installing standard versions and migrating between versions, primarily). If I wanted to manually manage all my Rubies, I wouldn't be using RVM. I like the sentiment of being less of a hack than RVM, but I just don't see much use for this particular set of functions
The main use case is for specifying per-application Ruby version dependencies. For example, at 37signals, most of our apps run on REE, but our new apps run on 1.9.x, and we're gradually moving everything to 1.9. When you have multiple people working on multiple apps every day, it's essential that this dependency information is checked into version control. Even more so when certain branches of an app may depend on different versions.
Both rvm and rbenv allow you to specify per-application dependencies (rvm with .rvmrc files, rbenv with .rbenv-version files). The difference is that rbenv does it in a much simpler, less invasive way.
I should have specified that, I do not necessarily think it is a bad product, but it did frustrate me a lot when trying to set it up. I'm sure it has saved a lot of developers time, but I speak for myself and myself alone, and the cost-benefit for me was way off.
RVM provides a great service to people who work on multiple projects with multiple dependencies across the range of Rubies. Knowing how complicated that type of development was before RVM, I can attest that it may many people's lives a hell of a lot easier.
And if you bother to RTFM, is very easy to understand and employ every day, compared to other parts of the Ruby ecosystem who don't have a talented developer supporting the project and if you cannot understand the basics of RVM, I would be loathe to encourage you to explore those other parts of Ruby world that'll make you feel utterly incompetent.
For one gem dependencies can be handled through Bundles. If you mean version dependencies, I will give you that. But just because RVM's goal is great doesn't mean it's execution is flawless.
Also, I did RTFM. Do not make assumptions about why I failed to get it to work. There are a million variables when trying to get anything to work (OS, env variables, etc).
Lastly, I love feeling utterly incompetent, because it usually means I am learning a lot. Furthermore, what areas of the Ruby language are you talking about exactly?
Looks interesting. It's always been pretty amazing to me that a system like RVM remains so popular when it depends on overriding the operation of basic commands like 'cd'.
Yeah it's a really interesting demonstration of something that is just so darn useful that you're crazy not to use it (on your development machine), regardless of your complaints with it.
That's the main reason I'm not using RVM. I depend on `cd` to work, every time, rock solid, especially when my system is unstable. I can't risk having a dependency or bug in their `cd` script breaking my most commonly used shell command.
So then what did you use on your development machine to test your ruby apps with till now? What did you use if not RVM? I am happy that RVM exists and made my life as ruby developer much easier even if it overrides 'cd'. Also to note i never had problems with RVM. Your main reason not using RVM is poor, as if there were more options out there till now.
Besides the whole `cd` override thing, I am curious why so many people are "confused" or have problems with RVM? (This is a genuine question. I've never had problems with RVM, but obviously others have, so I am curious)
I love the simplicity of Rbenv. I also love the "it's never good enough" mentality. I have not had any issues with RVM, but that doesn't mean people like Sam shouldn't try to build something better.
I think this quite reflects the whole evolution theory - something quite good is replaced by something a little bit better, which is again replaced by something a bit better, and so on, and so on, and so on.
It more so to me reflects the knee-jerk reaction of many in the Ruby community to jump to newer projects simply because they are newer. I like rvm a lot and use it all the time. I'm sure rbenv is a good solution as well. I think it's a bit premature to say it's an overall better solution.
Makes sense, though I'll stick to RVM until I change my mind - RVM floats my boat, haven't had any serios issues and I live in the shell. Bad short-term (community confusion), good long-term (evolution of initial innovation). I'm very neutral here.
I got a simple solution for all you distro vs RVM people: People who prefer to use RVM - use RVM, people who prefer to use distro - use distro. Until you have proven that a server that runs distro is 2x more valuable in $ - post on HN and we could review it again. Reminding you of that we don't live in a totally symmetric universe.
Yes RVM is a crazy hack, but that's why I love it! Has anyone actually had problems with RVM overriding 'cd'? Has RVM changed the behavior of 'cd' in a way that was a problem for you?
> Has anyone actually had problems with RVM overriding 'cd'?
I did, in two different ways. The first time, cd was returning the wrong exit status. (That is, it had become a function and was returning the exit status of its last command, rather than the exit status of the actual cd call. A common gotcha when you override shell built-ins or other commands.) The incorrect exit status caused a number of shell scripts completely unrelated to rvm to break. That made it harder to debug, obviously. The second time I had trouble, TAB autocompletion with cd was broken. At one point, rvm was doing its own autocompletion for cd, although the last time I looked, it no longer does that by default. (Yeah, just checked - that code path is still opt-in by setting rvm_cd_complete_flag=1.)
Having said that, both times when I went into #rvm on Freenode to talk to Wayne about it, he could not have been more helpful.
Having said that, I still wish that as a design decision, rvm didn't override cd.
I don't know if it was due to a weird environment variable or something, but when I installed RVM it got itself into an infinite loop sometimes when I did `cd`.
I reported a bug, but the author couldn't reproduce or fix it. So now I recommend anyone who asks me not to use rvm, because it's utterly ridiculous.
It would be somewhat cool if ruby-build knew how to look for an rbenv folder to install rubies into, or if rbenv knew how to drive ruby-build to put rubies in the right directory, but otherwise it's pretty nice.
It is fairly small, but I think part of the idea is to decouple rbenv from how or with what tools you build Rubies. (It might make sense, though, for someone to create and maintain a fork that bundles ruby-build and rbenv.)
Pretty nice, but I actually do really like having gemsets. It gets me as close to the production environment as possible, plus it makes it really easy to clean up unused gems when I'm done with a project.
For anyone that grew up outside of using a Bourne Shell (bash, sh, etc) like myself, this appears to be compatible with at least the C shell. A welcome relief, in my opinion.
I appreciate RVM and Wayne offers fantastic, other-worldly support. That said, there's always room for alternatives and I'm intrigued by rbenv. The part that gives me pause is the need to run `rbenv rehash` after installing a ruby (not so bad and possibly fixable if the aforementioned change to ruby-build is made) or after installing a gem that has binaries (I predict I will forget to do this a ton).
I could definitely see myself wanting to override `gem` in order to detect binary installations and automatically rehash. At which point, it's not so unobtrusive!
Still interested enough to try it out and see if that is as much of a hassle as I think it will be.
I don't see a pressing need to use RVM in production; when I deploy, I pick a Ruby version and stick with it unless there's a security issue, at which point I pull the updated REE package from Phusion/let Heroku figure it out.
Considering the many times I've seen RVM installs fail due to checked-in broken code, I'd hardly call it "production ready" either.
The complete lack of a changelog doesn't help either. I never know whether something's going to break in a new release and almost every new release has some little semantic change that borks my system.
I have to use rvm in production because debian/ubuntu install ruby 1.8 and I need 1.9.2 for rails 3. Ruby isn't in the alternatives system (yet - coming soon) so I don't see a better way.
1.9.1 is there, 1.9.2 is not. But I still the the better solution is to build from source on each machine, or create a custom 1.9.2 package for the machines you will be using. As other comments have pointed out, RVM is held together with string and duct tape and breaks frequently. I haven't dug into the code from this project, but being more testable and maintainable would be one of the biggest wins they could achieve from my point of view.
I have to contradict you (unless I'm misunderstanding you): the debian package named ruby1.9.1 is actually 1.9.2. The 1.9.1 refers to the ruby ABI. Blame the ruby devs for breaking the ABI in a minor version update (1.9.0 -> 1.9.[12]).
That's the goal, and that's why rbenv does not perform compilation/installation at all (there's a separate ruby-build project for that: https://github.com/sstephenson/ruby-build).
RVM belongs nowhere near production. It exists so that the guys with the macbooks can sync up versions with what is happening in the Linux distro, not the reverse.
I know very few people using the distro version of Ruby in production. Most are using either rvm (not so desirable) or a custom-compiled version (more desirable).
In my experience, the version of Ruby shipping in most Linux distros and package systems is outdated or less than ideal for production use.
Apt-pinning and source packages are great ways to bring newer Ruby in to Debian stab
The first thing I did after you left our common former employer was ditch all of the manually-installed REE on Ubuntu and changed to Debian stable with .debs of ruby and rubygems pinned in from testing. It was an improvement.
+1. Many programmers who are not admins tend to install stuff according to their one-time desire and then announce it "production ready". In fact, there's something called "release management" and it's a rather different mindset. Please coders, respect your admins (and vice-versa), or learn to play both roles. Tools like rvm, while cool, are not substitute for this, because they can create an illusion that there's nothing to learn. There is.
I'm not familiar with the technique you're referring to, is there a reference you could point me to that discusses "apt-pinning" packages from testing? We recently had a "there must be a better way" moment trying to get a standardized Ruby 1.9.2 installation set up - I think what you're describing is that better way.
Because going back to non-packaged non-vetted flavor-of-the-month code is a retrograde step back to 1993. You lose consistency, you lose the ability to reliably recreate a same environment, you lose tested and low-friction security updates, you lose dependency management, you lose the security of a crypto web-of-trust, and you lose the google-fu of being on the exact same versions of software as thousands of other people.
I'd tend to agree, with one exception: it's sometimes even more desirable to construct own /usr/local version of some critical packages (database, languages, crucial libs) instead of distro versions; then recreate this on your all production nodes and never upgrade it without a carefully thought reason and pre-prod test.
Two main reasons for this:
- sometimes the version provided by the distro doesn't have set of features which you need and careful admin can provide it for you,
- sometimes distro packagers or upstream folks violate semantic versioning (incidentally or not) and upon upgrade from distro, some of your sub-features ("sub-" doesn't have to mean "not critical") break.
Of course you lose the google-fu you've mentioned, but to be honest, many production environments are so distinct that there's no sane way to compare one to "typical Debian X.Y server".
I personally find FreeBSD approach very convenient wrt to the issues above, because ports evolve independently from the base system; but YMMV.
I'll take your word for it. For me, it mostly saves me a bunch of time.
Edit: Just in case I'm coming off as snarky here, I don't mean to. My projects tend to be on the simpler end, and rvm saves me a lot of time. I'm sure it's a little cowboyish for bigger projects - I was just wondering if there was something about rvm that made it universally inappropriate for production use.
Double Edit: "a bunch" is probably an overstatement. rvm was a great help transitioning to 1.9.2. I'm not sure if it will provide much utility going forward.
This is kind of a classic "fast, correct - choose one" debate. If saving time is more important, perhaps you should use RVM in production, if correctness is more important, you probably shouldn't. It comes down to how expensive your mistakes are.
If you only have one server and can script most of the install process it's not a problem. When you have more than one server, rvm is not going to save you time.
I have my gripes with RVM, but this isn't one of them. I work on a project for provisioning and deploying EC2 servers. It's a capistrano plugin called rubber.
In any event, the immediate benefit is we can provide a tool that lets our users set up whatever Ruby they want to use, as we shouldn't be forcing that on them. Moreover, it makes it dead simple to deploy different Rubies out to different parts of the cluster, since everything is role-based. That's far from the common use case -- most people use the same Ruby everywhere. But if you have more complex needs, RVM affords a lot.
To be fair, Wayne has always said that RVM was made for production first and development second. Not sure if it is fair to say it is not production ready since it has always been geared toward just that.
It doesn't matter what Wayne has always said. He's designed a collection of fragile shell script hacks that want to be run as root that fundamentally change the behavior of key system commands.
You don't have to run them as root. You can run them as a regular user. I'm pretty sure Wayne recommends against RVM system-wide and the preferred method is just installing it for individual users.
login as regular user, download some version of ruby, compile for use as logged in user, install rvm, shazzam install any version of ruby you want - all of this only applies to the logged in user and has zero impact on the rest of the system. RVM rules :)
I no longer install ruby at a system level, not needed, only users running ruby stuff need ruby installed and never use distro ruby, creates all sorts of issues...
I'm guessing rbenv isn't meant for production. As to some of the comments about how you should never use RVM in production, it's complete crap. I've used RVM in production on multiple servers for well over a year. RVM fits perfectly in corporate environments where you have no access to the sudo command.
With RVM you can change the rubygems version for an installed ruby interpreter. Is something like these possible with rbenv too? i use rubygems -v 1.3.6 for ruby-1.8.7 and rubygems -v 1.8.6 for ruby-1.9.2. I remember i had problems using rubygems 1.8.6 with ruby-1.8.7
I am currently porting a Ruby application over to JRuby, and use tmux (although I am pretty sure screen would behave the same). Let's say you have two rubies installed, ree and jruby. You start out using ree, and are using screen/tmux, and have two screens open.
If you switch to JRuby in the first screen, then switch to the second, the changes don't propagate. e.g.:
It's not a big deal -- you just have to make sure you do the right thing -- but it is unexpected and has burned me a couple of times. It looks like rbenv won't suffer from this problem.
Of course that is expected behaviour: tux loads multiple independant shell environments. A change in one will not affect the other. The same holds true for modifying the PATH environment variable, which is how rbenv works. So I'm not sure how you're expecting rbenv to avoid that behaviour.
But thats exactly, what I expect from rvm. When i'm in in one projecti want too to use that Ruby with that gelder and not the other Ruby and gemset. So rbvm is not want I want to use with tmux.
