Is it possible to install precompiled Ruby versions with RVM

amazon ec2rubyrvm

I'm using EC2 and sometimes launch servers that I want to use only for a short time. Usually I want to install some version or versions of Ruby on them, and for this RVM is very convenient — if it wasn't for the fact that it takes forever to compile Ruby. It's really boring to have to wait almost half an hour just for Ruby to compile when the rest of the server setup is done in minutes. It completely kills the cloud computing experience.

Is there a way to get the convenience of RVM without the inconvenience of compiling each Ruby version for every new server I launch? Can I precompile a Ruby version and keep it somewhere accessible, and then have RVM use that instead of compiling it from source? Can I simply archive some directory under the RVM root dir after I've installed a Ruby version, save it somewhere and then extract it in the right place on the next server I launch? In that case, which files and directories do I need to keep?

I want to use RVM not only to be able to switch between Ruby versions, but also because it allows me to keep separate gemsets for different applications, so not using RVM would be very inconvenient.

All servers have the same OS and architecture, Ubuntu 10.04, 32 bit.

Best Answer

If you roll up and deploy your pre-configured ~/.rvm folder and make sure the remote .bashrc is configured to use it, do you get any problems? From what I can tell, rvm is designed to allow you to do this.

The only snags I imagine could be around making sure you have the right gems and packages in place to allow your code to run. But then, you'd prepare your .rvm on the target platform right? Also, take into account any OS packages required by your ruby environment.

Related Solutions

Install Ruby 1.8.7 on Fedora 11/12

RVM may not work today on Fedora 12. The problem is to compile Ruby against the openssl-1.0.0(beta 3 or 4) version packaged with F12: It does not work.

The Ruby Core community is aware of the problem, and fixed it. The code is patched in the ruby1-8-8 and ruby1-9.x development branches. But then, it is difficult to get these patches with RVM. RVM will fetch a specific version from "stable" repositories (not sure it is the appropriate term), e.g.

rvm install 1.8.7-p174  # <= Will NOT work today!

Which does not include yet the above patches. And if you try with RVM to get the latest version of the 1.8.7 core like p278, some independent segfaults problems occur (one reason why the RVM documentation recommends the p174 one).

If you need a working Ruby quick, an install from source works well on F12. It was the solution I chose, waiting for patched versions manageable by the very helpful RVM.

How to get Apache’s www-data to recognize RVm

You probably need to set up the PassengerRoot and PassengerRuby directives to point to the version of ruby you want it to use (the one controlled by RVM). If you're not doing so already, I'd also recommend using one gemset per app. You may decide to install passenger into whatever gemset you wish, as long as the apache directives are set correctly.

Example (using ree and Ubuntu):

sudo apt-get install build-essential bison openssl libreadline5 libreadline5-dev curl zlib1g zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libsqlite3-0 libsqlite3-dev sqlite3 libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev  autoconf libc6-dev ncurses-dev libmysqlclient15-dev apache2-prefork-dev apache2-mpm-prefork libapr1-dev libaprutil1-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev 
rvm use ree@${gemset_here} --create --default --passenger
rvm ree@${gemset_here} gem install passenger --version="${PASSENGER_VERSION}"
passenger-install-apache2-module --auto --apxs2-path $(which apxs2)

You may need to get the appropriate build dependencies for your distro. After passenger compiles, you'll need to make sure you configure it (check the output). If you need the apache conf snippet to use, run this:

passenger-install-apache2-module --snippet

I put mine in /etc/apache2/conf.d/passenger.conf (on an Ubuntu system). Your config dir may vary depending on distro. If you still get problems at this point, it may be that you need to fix some permissions on the RVM gemset directories you are using.

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