Getting up-to-date Ruby versions with distro’s rbenv

Photo by Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash

You know Ruby 2.7.0-rc1 has been released? It’s awesome!

However, there’s an annoying thing I face every time a new version of Ruby is released: I had to wait for several days to get an up-to-date distro version of ruby-build. Especially, homebrew users will probably agree with me.

I’ve recently found a clever solution to this: manually downloading a manifest.

In ruby-build, we simply have one manifest per one version, and we can list them on GitHub. Download the version you want from there:

wget 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rbenv/ruby-build/master/share/ruby-build/2.7.0-rc1'

# Alternatively, with curl
curl -O 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rbenv/ruby-build/master/share/ruby-build/2.7.0-rc1'

You can pass a filename to rbenv install, which just looks like a normal way of specifying a version:

rbenv install 2.7.0-rc1  # points to a file called ./2.7.0-rc1