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