How to change default gems repository on Debian

[Peter Hoang]

Hi all,

I'm trying to upgrade an old gem installation (0.9.5) on Debian machine.
On Debian, the default gem repository is /var/lib/gems/1.8. However, if
I install gem from source, the default location of the repository would
be /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/. I can export GEM_HOME variable to change the
location however, this will not work for crontab scripts which bypass
bash_profile and /etc/profile. There are many crontab scripts setup by
our users and it's quite hard to force everyone to change their scripts.
Therefore, I need to make sure that the default gem repository is
/var/lib/gems/1.8. How do I force gem installation to do this instead of
using /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8?

Thanks.

 

[David Masover]

I can export GEM_HOME variable to change the
location however, this will not work for crontab scripts which bypass
.bash_profile and /etc/profile.

It might be worth trying .bashrc -- .bash_profile is specifically for
interactive logins -- but that won't work if they're using /bin/sh.

Another possibility is /etc/environment, though I remember that not working...

Worst case, there's always setting the environment variable directly
in /etc/crontab.

There's also tricks like symlinks, bind-mounts, etc.

I'm sure Rubygems can be installed wherever you like -- but you really should
solve the problem of being able to set global environment variables.