I’m an Ubuntu user and I enjoy most server-side scripting languages but I haven’t done much Ruby and I never get the feeling that Ruby is pleased to see me when I do. Something is always out of date or has an incompatible dependency or … and since I don’t use it regularly, I don’t have the familiarity that enables me to easily debug these things with other platforms.

I’ve been using the Ruby Snap on Ubuntu for a while now, and I think it’s a bit better? I’ve referred to my notes every time I’ve done it though so I thought I had better put them somewhere I’ll find them even when I’m using a new notebook :)

What versions are available?

snap info ruby will show your choices of versions to install. I usually just need a major.minor version combination so I set the version with:

sudo snap switch ruby --channel=2.5/stable
sudo snap refresh

If you see a lot of “extension not built” anger then try this: ruby.gem pristine --extensions

Using Ruby and Gem and Bundle

The snap actually ships with all these commands available as separate commands:

• ruby (just check this is the right one! Should be the same as /snap/bin/ruby – if it’s not check what order things are in your $PATH)
• ruby.gem is the gem executable for this snap ruby
• ruby.bundle is the bundler gem for this snap ruby (I use this one the most since my ruby usage is basically bundle exec jekyll serve most of the time!)

Beware that the 2.5 channel has bundler v2 and the 2.6 channel has v1, I have no idea why but it’s tripped me up at least four times now