Is RVM production ready?

Question

RVM is great for developing on your local machine. But is it safe on a production machine?

Answer 1

I built RVM for production and added the developer 'niceties' later on. If you would like more information read the documentation on the website and come talk to me in #rvm on irc.freenode.net sometime during the day EDT most days.

Answer 2

Since RVM is just a fancy way of downloading, isolating and switching between existing Ruby implementations, I'd say that it's as production ready as whatever ruby implementation you're currently running it with.

Essentially, all RVM does is point your path at a specific Ruby implementation. This is exactly what happens when you use your *nix distribution's Ruby implementation. The only real difference is that your path will be re-written so that when you run ruby -v it will run a ruby from your current user's .rvm directory instead of a global system directory like /usr/local/bin.

I'd go even further and say that using RVM is a better solution than using what generally gets installed in a *nix distro because it makes it easy to sandbox the specific ruby implementation on a per-user basis. RVM also makes it possible to attempt switching rubies (ie; from 1.8.7 to 1.9.2) on your production app while keeping a solid rollback strategy in place if something doesn't work quite right. It also makes it easier to keep old applications running on one version of Ruby, while switching new apps to more current versions.