System-wide RVM to replace a home directory loaded on different architectures

Question

I saw some questions like this already, but it seems that system-wide RVM has been deprecated, so none of the answers apply.

I have an NFS-mounted home directory which is accessible to me when I login to any number of different machines in our lab. As such, a locally-compiled Ruby will break when I try to use it on these different machines -- as they have different architectures.

I installed RVM as superuser, but I can't figure out how to direct my regular user account to use the superuser-selected Ruby. Instead it always tries to use the one in ~/bin .

What is the appropriate way to select the global Ruby?

Answer 1

I struggled with this same issue for quite a while. I ended up doing the following:

Install rvm with the following command line (note: the --path option is not mentioned in the usage, so I don't know how supported it is, but it worked for me), with the appropriate architecture in the path:

rvm-installer --path ~/tools/x86_64/rvm --version latest

Install for whatever architectures you want to be able to support. (note: make sure you don't have a.rvmrc file overriding the path, especially during the second install.)

Then add the following to your.bashrc/.bash_profile:

OS=$(uname -s)
if [[ $OS = Linux ]] ; then
>   ARCH=$(uname -m | sed 's/i.86/i686/')
elif [[ $OS = FreeBSD ]] ; then
>   ARCH=$(uname -m | sed 's/i.86/i686/')
elif [[ $OS = Darwin ]] ; then
>   ARCH=mac
else
>   ARCH=unknown
fi
export ARCH

There will be a line added by the installer in your.bash_profile that sets up the rvm function, change it to look like this:

[[ -s "$HOME/tools/$ARCH/rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && . "$HOME/tools/$ARCH/rvm/scripts/rvm" 

You should also edit your.rvmrc file to have the following:

export rvm_path="$HOME/tools/$ARCH/rvm"

I haven't had time to fully test out this setup, but at least it appears to be invoking the correct version of RVM on the different platforms.

Good luck!