I’ve been using chruby to manage my ruby versions for a few months — I like it’s lightweight approach.

A combination of bundler’s binstubs, the introduction of rails 4 introducing the bin directory and trying to use the environment to configure my apps has meant I wanted a way to to manage my environment on a per project basis.

I’ve tried using dotenv, which works well for ruby projects, and for setting environment variables to be used by your app — but, as far as I can tell, it doesn’t actually modify your environment. So setting your PATH to select the correct binary, e.g. bin/rails in a rails app, won’t work.

Enter direnv. direnv looks for a .envrc file in a directory and loads any thing there into your environment. You have to specifically allow direnv to load a file, and it tracks modifications to the file. It’s very nice.

Unfortunately, I had a problem using it alongside chruby — everytime I entered a directory direnv would do it’s thing and then chruby would follow suit, and I could never quite get the result I wanted! For example, I’d have the right version of ruby, but the wrong PATH &mdash or the right PATH with the wrong ruby.

To fix this I removed chruby’s auto switching feature from my default environment, and based on a suggestion here added a use_ruby function to my ~/.direnvrc:

source /usr/local/share/chruby/chruby.sh

# use ruby [version]
use_ruby() {
  local ver=$1
  if [[ -z $ver ]] && [[ -f .ruby-version ]]; then
    ver=$(cat .ruby-version)
  fi
  if [[ -z $ver ]]; then
    echo Unknown ruby version
    exit 1
  fi
  chruby $ver
}

This checks for a .ruby-version file, and, if it finds one, defers to chruby to load the correct ruby environment.

I can now use this function in a project .envrc to load ruby before I modify the path:

use ruby
PATH_add bin

You can also pass a ruby version to the use_ruby function:

use ruby 2.1
PATH_add bin

If you don’t want to use a .ruby-version file.

This seems to work really well. The only downside is that I don’t have autoswitching of ruby versions anymore — unless I decide that’s what I want. I don’t think its too bad to have to be explicit about that.