I just moved my laptop to run an arch derivative because I got a new SSD installed for more exiciting projects. To my surprise the current version of ruby in the repos was out of date by 9 months. So I had to learn how to use rbenv in order to build my blog and deploy new posts. It’s just like virtual environments with python, but unfamiliar because I only use ruby because I did this site in Jekyll, and to migrate would defeat the purpose of this site which is to share my writing and show off the cool things I built.

(Still it’s really impressive how long this site has ran on the same stack, it’s been almost 9 years, and it’s still active)

Installing and Setting Up

You’ll need to install the rbenv and ruby-build packages from the AUR. On my flavor of Arch it’s the pamac command.

Install the latest package by looking for the highest version and then install it.

rbenv install --list
rbenv install 3.3.0

It frustrating that you’re building all of these things from scratch instead of downloading a prebuilt binary package like most things these days, and make -j8 can hang my laptop surprisingly enough. That’s a thing to consider another day.

Add the below line to your .zshrc per the RbEnv Github.

eval "$(rbenv init - zsh)"

Side Note

During the update I learned about some other intersting libraries like OpenSlide which helps researcheres examine and read medical image files. I learned about it because libvips failed to load a shared object related to it. It’s amazing how many pieces of opensource exist that we depend on each day. I use libvips to resize my post thumbnails via jekyll-thumb, it’s a handy and fast plugin for jekyll.

Conclusion

Alright so now I’m following best practices with programming because I’m using an installation that isn’t the system one (although I don’t really get how that’s better than just staying up to date, and working with the current version). If I’m deploying to production I would much prefer to use the system version because that was already tested, but it’s whatever since this is just for my static site generator.