Copying a Ruby installation

[Murali Somanchy]

I am trying to copy an entire ruby installation

So, say for e.g. I installed ruby under /usr/ruby

e.g. cp -R /usr/ruby /usr1; rm -rf /usr/ruby

I want to be able to copy it to some other directory say /usr1/ruby and
run (Let us also imagine that /usr/ruby has been deleted). My use case
is that of cloning a ruby repo across the network. So the user that
clones the ruby installation cannot see the original installation under
/usr/ruby

So, I did the copy (clone) and it was unable to find things like
fileutils initially. Then, I set the RUBYLIB and it again failed in
yaml.rb saying

ruby/lib/ruby/1.9.1/yaml.rb:9:in `require': no such file to load --
stringio (LoadError)

What other variables do I have to set to make a copied/cloned ruby
installation work?

 

[Roger Pack]

e.g. cp -R /usr/ruby /usr1; rm -rf /usr/ruby

Unfortunately with linux installed ruby, some things (like the #! first
line of installed binaries) are hard coded to the location of ruby when
they were first installed.

If that's not a hinderance, though, *maybe* you could get by with
changing rbconfig.rb
Maybe.

On windows interestingly this isn't a problem--it can't run scripts
anyway so it always (for better or worse) just runs the first ruby it
finds in the path. So you can move your ruby dirs in windows all right.

-=r

 

[Brian Candler]

I want to be able to copy it to some other directory say /usr1/ruby and
run (Let us also imagine that /usr/ruby has been deleted).

This may or may not work. Ruby remembers a lot of things about how it
was built and where it was installed: see

$ ruby -rrbconfig -rpp -e 'pp Config::CONFIG'

Have a look in your rbconfig.rb, which may be somewhere like
/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/i486-linux/rbconfig.rb

Many of the constants in this file are defined relative to where
rbconfig.rb itself exists, so they will be OK, but others may not.

Tools like rake use 'bindir' + 'ruby_install_name' to locate the ruby
interpreter itself (to reinvoke it)

It is almost certainly going to be safer to recompile ruby to install
under /usr1/ruby, and then distribute that. Use:

./configure --prefix=/usr1/ruby