Ruby Version Manager, often abbreviated as RVM, is a software platform for

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operating systems designed to manage multiple installations of

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on the same device. The entire Ruby environment including the Ruby interpreter, installed

RubyGems RubyGems is a package manager for the Ruby programming language that provides a standard format for distributing Ruby programs and libraries (in a self-contained format called a "gem"), a tool designed to easily manage the installation of gems ...

(gems), and documentation is partitioned. A developer can then switch between the different versions to work on several projects with different version requirements. In addition to

MRI Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a medical imaging technique used in radiology to form pictures of the anatomy and the physiological processes of the body. MRI scanners use strong magnetic fields, magnetic field gradients, and radio waves ...

, the standard Ruby interpreter, RVM functions as an installer for various other implementations of Ruby. These include

JRuby JRuby is an implementation of the Ruby programming language atop the Java Virtual Machine, written largely in Java. It is free software released under a three-way EPL/GPL/ LGPL license. JRuby is tightly integrated with Java to allow the embeddin ...

mruby mruby is an interpreter for the Ruby programming language with the intention of being lightweight and easily embeddable. The project is headed by Yukihiro Matsumoto, with over 100 contributors currently working on the project. Features mruby 1.0 ...

MacRuby MacRuby is a discontinued implementation of the Ruby language that ran on the Objective-C runtime and CoreFoundation framework under development by Apple Inc. which "was supposed to replace RubyCocoa". It targeted Ruby 1.9 and used the high per ...

IronRuby IronRuby is an implementation of the Ruby programming language targeting Microsoft .NET Framework. It is implemented on top of the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR), a library running on top of the Common Language Infrastructure that provides dynam ...

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Rubinius Rubinius was an alternative Ruby implementation created by Evan Phoenix. Based loosely on the Smalltalk-80 ''Blue Book'' design, Rubinius sought to "provide a rich, high-performance environment for running Ruby code." Goals Rubinius follows in ...

, Ruby Enterprise Edition, Topaz, and GoRuby (an interpreter optimized for

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). In addition, RVM supports the installation of patched versions of MRI. RVM provides features for organization of Ruby gems through "gemsets", collections of gems separated by a namespace and associated Ruby installation. Gemsets can be associated with directories/projects through the use of the RVM-exclusive .rvmrc file. An alternative to using the .rvmrc file (and the general purpose although user-specific .jrubyrc) and its format is use of the .ruby-version and .ruby-gemset files, which are compatible with other ruby version managers, such as RBenv and chruby. Additionally, using .rvmrc requires trusting to prevent execution of unauthorized code, while .ruby-version does not.

References

External links

* * Ruby (programming language) {{Unix-stub