Installing Ruby and Ruby Gems in a USB Flash Stick

[Ruby Student]

[Note: parts of this message were removed to make it a legal post.]

Hello team,

Had anyone installed Ruby in a USB Flash Stick?
I installed 1.9.1 using the vxRuby installer, which installs ruby and
wxruby, in my 64GB USB memory stick.
This created the following issues:


1. When I run it from a machine that already has ruby installed, I don't
know from where ruby is running.
2. When I try to install any gem, it actuall go to the C-Drive instead of
my USB stick. I noticed that you can tell gem where to install gems, but it
is not clear to me.

F:\>gem help install
Usage: gem install GEMNAME [GEMNAME ...] [options] -- --build-flags
[options]
Options:
-i, --install-dir DIR Gem repository directory to get
installed gems
-n, --bindir DIR Directory where binary files are
located

For example, since in my case for this period of time my USB is drive F, I
thought that this would work, and it does...kind of:

*F:\>gem install ezcrypto -i F:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.9.1\gems
*Successfully installed ezcrypto-0.7.2
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for ezcrypto-0.7.2...
Installing RDoc documentation for ezcrypto-0.7.2...
*ERROR: While executing gem ... (TypeError)
can't convert Pathname into String*

This installs the gem but in the folder specified, but it does not creates a
dir for the gem. It puts all the files in *F:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.9.1\gems.
*
I was expecting something like: *F:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.9.1\gems\ezcrypto*

The other problem that you can see is installing the documentation. This
appears to be a known bug because it is happening on every machine where I
installed 1.9.1. For now I am not too worry about it.

Comments from anyone will be appreciated.

Thank you

 

[Alex Fenton]

Had anyone installed Ruby in a USB Flash Stick?
....


1. When I run it from a machine that already has ruby installed, I don't
know from where ruby is running.
2. When I try to install any gem, it actuall go to the C-Drive instead of
my USB stick. I noticed that you can tell gem where to install gems, but it
is not clear to me.

You should look into setting a PATH environment variable to tell the
system you're working on to look for the 'ruby' and 'gem' executables on
the USB stick, rather than on C:/ etc. Have a look at:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=path+environment

alex

 

[Ruby Student]

[Note: parts of this message were removed to make it a legal post.]

Ruby Student wrote:

Had anyone installed Ruby in a USB Flash Stick?

...


1. When I run it from a machine that already has ruby installed, I don't

You should look into setting a PATH environment variable to tell the system
you're working on to look for the 'ruby' and 'gem' executables on the USB
stick, rather than on C:/ etc. Have a look at:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=path+environment

alex

Thanks Alex!