-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 0
Gems, Eggs and Perl Modules
On a fresh OS X installation there are three empty directories:
/Library/Ruby /Library/Python /Library/Perl
When you gem install, easy_install or cpan -i stuff gets installed to these directories in a nicely segregated fashion similar to Homebrew.
These directories start empty — you are meant to fill them with your stuff and not worry about it.
On fresh OS X installing to these three directories doesn’t require sudo. Please note that since Lion these directories are no longer staff-group writable. As yet we are not sure what to suggest as an alternative. One option is a chgrp -R, but do so with caution.
Habit maybe?
One reason is executables go in /usr/local/bin. Usually this isn’t a writable location. But if you installed Homebrew as we recommend, /usr/local will be writable without sudo. So now you are good to install the development tools you need without risking a sudo.
If you use RVM or rbenv then you should ignore this stuff.
Ruby installs executables to ~/.gem/bin without sudo. This is non-ideal, so this section is about making it install to /usr/local instead.
We need to add gem: -n/usr/local/bin to your ~/.gemrc. It’s YAML…so do it manually or use this:
echo "gem: -n/usr/local/bin" >> ~/.gemrc
However all versions of RubyGems before 1.3.6 are buggy and ignore the above setting. Sadly a fresh install of Snow Leopard comes with 1.3.5. Currently the only known way to get round this is to upgrade rubygems as root:
sudo gem update --system
Just install everything into the Homebrew prefix like this:
echo "export GEM_HOME='$(brew --prefix)'" >> ~/.bashrc
Note, maybe you shouldn’t do this on Lion, since Apple have decided it is not a good default.
If you ever did a sudo gem, etc. before then a lot of files will have been created chown root. Fix with:
sudo chown -R $USER /Library/Ruby /Library/Perl /Library/Python