Installing Ruby gems not working with Home Brew

Homebrew is nice. However unlike brew and npm, gem does not make aliases in /usr/local/bin automatically.

Solution

I went for a very simple approach (as of March 2020):

# Based on "`brew --prefix ruby`/bin"export PATH=/usr/local/opt/ruby/bin:$PATH# Based on "`gem environment gemdir`/bin"export PATH=/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/3.0.0/bin:$PATH

Add this to your .bashrc (or .bash_profile, .zshrc, etc.).

That's it! Now all Ruby bins and installed gems will be available from your shell!

In older versions of Homebrew (before 2017), there was a separate package for Ruby 2 called ruby20, for which you'd use the following snippet instead:

export PATH=/usr/local/opt/ruby20/bin:$PATH

This line was the only line needed at the time. But, in Ruby 2.1 the gems got moved to a separate directory. No longer under /usr/local/opt/ruby/bin, but instead at /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/2.0.0/bin (where "2.0.0" is the last major Ruby version for Gem's purposes).

How it works

Homebrew keeps track of where it installed a package, and maintains a symbolic link for you that points there.

$ brew --prefix ruby/usr/local/opt/ruby$ l /usr/local/opt/ruby/usr/local/opt/ruby@ -> ../Cellar/ruby/2.5.3_1

Effectively, adding /usr/local/opt/ruby to PATH is the same as the following:

export PATH=/usr/local/Cellar/ruby/2.5.3_1/bin:$PATH

Except, this long version hardcodes the currently installed version of Ruby and would stop working next time you upgrade Ruby.

As for Gem, the following command will tell you the exact directory Gem adds new packages to:

$ gem environment gemdir/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/2.7.0

Tools

These tools were meant to automatically bridge between Homebrew and Gem:

• josh/brew-gem (no longer exists)
• indirect/brewbygems (unmaintained)

I haven't used these but they might work for you.

brew unlink ruby; brew link ruby might add symlinks to /usr/local/bin/:

$ which sass$ brew unlink ruby; brew link rubyUnlinking /usr/local/Cellar/ruby/2.0.0-p0... 20 links removedLinking /usr/local/Cellar/ruby/2.0.0-p0... 31 symlinks created$ which sass/usr/local/bin/sass

brew --prefix ruby is still pretty slow, but you could also just add /usr/local/opt/ruby/bin to the path.

$ time brew --prefix ruby/usr/local/opt/ruby0.216$ time brew --prefix ruby/usr/local/opt/ruby0.076$ stat -f%Y /usr/local/opt/ruby../Cellar/ruby/2.0.0-p0

I like home brew. There's probably a better way to do this, but if you run:

gem environment

That will print out a nice list of all the relevant paths. Look for the one labeled EXECUTABLE DIRECTORY. That's the one you want to add to your path. In my case that's /usr/local/Cellar/ruby/1.9.3-p362/bin/ruby but I would imagine it would change with newer version of Ruby.

I'm using /bin/bash as my shell, but the process of adding it to your path should be pretty much the name.

I use TextWrangler (via the command line tools) to edit my .profile file. To do that, it's just:

edit ~/.profile

When your done, either close your terminal and open a new one, or run:

source ~/.profile