Ruby for iOS Developers — Part 2

In Part 1, we saw that we (MacOS users) are lucky to have Ruby preinstalled on our machines. That’s all fine and dandy but that Ruby is actually not there so that we make use of it, it is rather meant for the system itself. In other words if we somehow break that Ruby we will actually break parts of MacOS (which is definitely not what we want).

That’s why it’s good practice to have a Ruby version manager so that we can install different versions of Ruby side by side.

This will help with several issues. Most importantly it will allow us not to touch the system Ruby anymore. It will also allow us to have several versions of Ruby installed. This would help if we would have different projects which all require different versions of Ruby.

Imagine for example that a year ago you’ve setup a project which uses gems like cocoapods, fastlane, slather, etc… and all works fine. A couple of months later Apple announces their new OS, which you immediately install since you don’t want to feel outdated. Only to discover, after the long upgrade process, that they’ve bundled a different version of Ruby which one of the tools mentioned above does not support yet. What to do?

In order to avoid all of the above mentioned issues, we’ll be using a Ruby version manager. There are many great tools out there to pick from such as: RVM, RbEnv and asdf.

RVM is usually the go to version manager for beginner Rubyists. It does do a couple of neat tricks that help simplify the usage of…