How to install a gem globally without sudo using rbenv?

Question

I am using rbenv and I am trying to install sass without success.

So, I installed rbenv via Homebrew, then Ruby 2.2 (rbenv install 2.2) and finally gem install sass, but I was unable to make sass available on my $PATH.

Short on time, I sudo gem install sass using my system's (Yosemite) default Ruby 2. This put everything in /Library/Ruby/Gems/2.0.0 and things do work, but not in the most desireable way.

Ideally, using rbenv I should be able to install any Ruby version and have gems installed inside that version's directory and later symlinked to /usrl/local/bin.

Any help as to what could have gone wrong would be very much appreciated.

Answer 1

Basically, the problem was I did not add rbenv/bin/rbenv to $PATH.

export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"

Better yet, add this to your .bashrc or .bash_profile to start every session with rbenv.

After that, make sure to:

eval "$(rbenv init -)"

In order to enable shims and autocompletion.

fishshell

For those using fish, you can accomplish the same like this:

if status --is-interactive
  . (rbenv init - | psub)
end

Now, if you don't like modifying $PATH directly and have ownership over /usr/local/bin, a more nifty solution is to symlink with ~/.rbenv/bin/rbenv.

 ln -s ~/.rbenv/bin/rbenv /usr/local/bin

ruby-build

As a final warning, make sure to install ruby-build (a rbenv plugin to add the install command to rbenv and be able to easily install Ruby versions.)

If you are using homebrew it's easy as pie:

brew install ruby-build