Using Ruby Enterprise Edition, gems are not installed where I would expect

Question

I have just installed Ruby Enterprise Edition and am installing some gems for it. Stock Ruby 1.8.6 is also installed on the server.

I have added /opt/ruby-enterpri

Answer 1

There's a good explanation of what's going on here:

sudo changes PATH - why?

This assumes you're using Ubuntu. sudo does change the path under ubuntu.

The gem you have in /usr/bin/ is probably a symlink to /usr/bin/gem1.8. What I did was symlink ruby-enterprise's gem to /usr/bin/ree-gem like this:

sudo ln -s /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20090201/bin/gem /usr/bin/ree-gem

then I just use:

sudo ree-gem install some_gem

to install gems specifically for ree. If you're not using the ruby 1.8.6 rubygem, you can symlink REE's gem to /usr/bin/gem instead:

sudo ln -s /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20090201/bin/gem /usr/bin/gem