Amazon Linux latest ruby

Question

Amazon Linux 2012.03 now comes with ruby 1.9.3

To install it (as per the docs)

sudo yum install ruby19

But ruby -v shows 1.8.7 . How would I switch it over 1.9.3 (If its already there there would be no need to use RVM yes?)

Answer 1

The right way to do this on Amazon Linux is:

sudo yum update (to get latest version of Amazon Linux (2013.09 at time of this answer)
yum install ruby19 
alternatives --set ruby /usr/bin/ruby1.9

Answer 2

Supplementing @baboonWorksFine's answer, there are a number of 1.9 commands that can be symlinked as their undecorated equivalents. What I did was:

sudo -s
for f in /usr/bin/*1.9
do
  ln -s $f ${f%1.9}
done

That way, you don't accidentally miss any commands that need aliasing.

Answer 3

If you do this:

ls -l /usr/bin/ruby*

you will probably see this:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    7 Apr 26 18:27 /usr/bin/ruby -> ruby1.8
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3720 Mar 29 08:29 /usr/bin/ruby1.8
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3888 Mar 29 12:26 /usr/bin/ruby1.9

This is well self explained. So what you wanna do is:

rm /usr/bin/ruby && ln -s /usr/bin/ruby1.9 /usr/bin/ruby

Answer 4

Here is one simple solution and cleaner.

alternatives --config ruby

That will list all versions of Ruby you installed through yum. All you have to do is choose the number listed there and hit enter.

Answer 5

Ruby version 1.9 should be available under the name ruby19 or ruby1.9 . ruby is just a symbolic link that points to default version of ruby.

Answer 6

I used @Ian Dickinson's answer, but added an "f" to the ln options to force it to overwrite the existing link. So the code is:

sudo -s
for f in /usr/bin/*1.9
do
  ln -fs $f ${f%1.9}
done