What is ansible-ruby?

It is an Ansible role to install a specific version of ruby without having to compile ruby on the machine you're setting up. It does this by using rvm under the hood.

What problem does it solve and why is it useful?

I wasn't happy with any of the solutions that existed because they required you to either compile ruby on your server or they were not idempotent. Compiling ruby on a low end VPS/instance could easily take 10 minutes and during that time your CPU is going to be pegged at 100%.

ansible-ruby solves this by using rvm to install 1 or more versions of ruby. It makes installing and upgrading ruby versions very easy.

Role variables

The only variable you need to concern yourself about is ruby_version if you're happy with the default download and install path.

ruby_version: 2.1.1 # X.X.X-pXXX format

ruby_temp_download_path: /usr/local/src
ruby_rvm_install_path: /usr/local/rvm

Example playbook

For the sake of this example let's assume you have a group called app and you have a typical site.yml file.

To use this role edit your site.yml file to look something like this:

---
- name: ensure app servers are configured
- hosts: app

  roles:
    - { role: nickjj.ruby, tags: ruby }

Let's say you want to edit the default version, you can do this by opening or creating yourplaybook/group_vars/app.yml and then making it look something like this:

---
ruby_version: 2.0.0

Installation

$ ansible-galaxy install nickjj.ruby

Requirements

Tested on ubuntu 12.04 LTS but it should work on other versions that are similar.

License

MIT