Unable to install Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Question

I just upgraded my system to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (clean install) and tried to install Ruby using RVM. RVM itself installs fine (using this guide http://www.webupd8.org/2014/11/how-to-install-rvm-ruby-version-manager.html ), but when I then try to install Ruby I get the following error:

user@user:~$ rvm install 2.3.0
Searching for binary rubies, this might take some time.  
No binary rubies available for: ubuntu/16.04/x86_64/ruby-2.3.0.  
Continuing with compilation. Please read 'rvm help mount' to get more information on binary rubies.
Checking requirements for ubuntu.  
Requirements installation successful.  
Installing Ruby from source to: /usr/share/rvm/rubies/ruby-2.3.0, this may take a while depending on your cpu(s)...  
ruby-2.3.0 - #downloading ruby-2.3.0, this may take a while depending on your connection...  
% Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed  
     0     0    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--     0  
Warning: Failed to create the file ruby-2.3.0.tar.bz2.part: Permission denied  
0 13.5M    0 16384    0     0  19826      0  0:11:55 --:--:--  0:11:55 19811  
curl: (23) Failed writing body (0 != 16384)  
There was an error(23).  
Checking fallback: https://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/2.3/ruby-2.3.0.tar.bz2
% Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
     0     0    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:--  0:00:02 --:--:--     0
Warning: Failed to create the file ruby-2.3.0.tar.bz2.part: Permission denied  
     0 13.5M    0 16149    0     0   7324      0  0:32:16  0:00:02  0:32:14  7323  
curl: (23) Failed writing body (0 != 16149)  
There was an error(23).  
Failed download  
There has been an error fetching the ruby interpreter. Halting the installation.

Is that a general problem for 16.04? The exact method worked fine under 15.10. Any ideas how this can be fixed?

Answer 1

It looks like rvm is trying to install the Ruby to /usr/share/rvm, which I think means that it's being installed at the system-wide level rather than the user level. Is that what you wanted? That being the case, it may be necessary to run rvm as sudo:

user@user:~$ sudo rvm install 2.3.0

For what it's worth, I install rvm as me (my user) so that I don't have to mess with privileges; and I'm the only user on the system that needs rvm.

Answer 2

If you install rvm without sudo privileges, everything else should work as expected

If you have rvm installed, remove it using

rvm implode

or

rm -rf ~/.rvm

Then install rvm using

gpg --keyserver hkp://keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 409B6B1796C275462A1703113804BB82D39DC0E3
\curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable

Then install ruby with

rvm install 2.3.0

Use whichever version you wanna install.

Now go ahead and install rails

gem install rails

Answer 3

Try a reboot.

I had the same problem with two installs of Ubuntu 16.04 Both computers had the same problem, it was fixed after I rebooted.

rvm install ruby-2.5.0