ruby on rails - How do I use RVM and create globally available gems?

Question

I'm running Mac OSX 10.6.4 and have installed RVM. Its been great so far, I really love the way it lets me manage having multiple versions of rails and ruby on the same machine without headaches!

However, I don't want to have to install certain gems (such as passenger) for each setup. Is there a way to share gems between gemsets? I have a 1.8.7@rails2.3.8 and 1.9.2@rails3, can I have gems such as passenger, mysql, and capistrano installed once and used with all versions?

Answer 1

There is something called the global gemset, and it is shared between all your gemsets of a certain ruby-version. But you can't share gems between ruby-versions.

However, what you can do is create a list of gems that will be installed automatically when adding a new ruby version. That is described here. In short: edit a file called ~/.rvm/gemsets/global.gems to contain the list of gems you want to be there for each ruby-version.

Hope it helps.