rbenv and Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu 18.04

Adapted from How To Install Ruby on Rails with rbenv on Ubuntu 18.04

Ubuntu 18.04 virtual machine available

  • LAMP: Ubuntu 18.04, Apache 2.4, MariaDB 10.5, PHP 7.4.

Goals

  • Use rbenv to manage the version of Ruby.
  • Install Ruby on Rails v5+.

Install rbenv and dependencies

Install dependencies

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install autoconf bison build-essential libssl-dev libyaml-dev libreadline6-dev zlib1g-dev libncurses5-dev libffi-dev libgdbm5 libgdbm-dev

Install rbenv

git clone https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv

Append commands to .bashrc

  • Add ~/.rbenv/bin to your $PATH
  • Make rbenv load automatically
echo '
# Make rbenv load automatically
export RBENV_ROOT="${HOME}/.rbenv"
export PATH="${RBENV_ROOT}/bin:${PATH}"
eval "$(rbenv init -)"
' | tee -a ~/.bashrc

Check it

source ~/.bashrc
type rbenv

Install the ruby-build plugin

This plugin adds the rbenv install command, which simplifies the installation process for new versions of Ruby.

git clone https://github.com/rbenv/ruby-build.git ~/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build

Install Ruby

List available Ruby versions:

rbenv install -l

Install v2.6.4 and make it global:

rbenv install 2.6.4
rbenv global 2.6.4
ruby -v

To uninstall a Ruby version:

rbenv uninstall 2.5.0

Install Bundler

Suppress gem documentation generation:

echo "gem: --no-document" | tee ~/.gemrc

Check where gems are installed:

gem env home

Bundler is a tool that manages gem dependencies for projects.

gem install bundler

Install Ruby on Rails

List available Rails versions:

gem search '^rails$' --all

Install a v5+ version:

gem install rails -v 5.2.3
rails -v

Maintain rbenv shims:

rbenv rehash

References