How To Install Ruby on Rails on Arch Linux with RVM

Article Number: 216 | Rating: Unrated | Last Updated: Tue, Sep 23, 2025 at 11:28 PM

Step One— Install Ruby with RVM

Before we do anything else, we should run a quick update to make sure that all of the packages we download to our server are up to date:

pacman -Sy

Once that's done, we can start installing RVM, Ruby Version Manager. This is a great program that lets you use several versions of Ruby on one server; however, in this case, we will just use it to install the latest version of Ruby on the control panel.

If you do not have curl on your system, you can start by installing it:

pacman -S curl

To install RVM, open terminal and type in this command:

curl -L get.rvm.io | bash -s stable

After it is done installing, open your .bashrc file

nano .bashrc

and add this to the end:

[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && source "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm"

This will load RVM on startup. To apply the changes, exit your session and log back in.

In order to work, RVM has some of its own dependencies that need to be installed. Arch Linux will install these for you with

rvm requirements

Step Two—Install Ruby

Before installing Ruby, you need to install libyaml if you plan on installing Rails (you can do this later, but you'll need to reinstall Ruby if you do).

sudo pacman -S libyaml

installing Ruby with RVM is easy.

rvm install 1.9.3

Ruby is now installed. However, since we accessed it through a program that has a variety of Ruby versions, we need to tell the system to use 1.9.3 by default.

rvm use 1.9.3 --default

Step Three—Install RubyGems

The next step makes sure that we have all the required components of Ruby on Rails. We can continue to use RVM to install gems; type this line into terminal.

 rvm rubygems current

Step Four—Install Rails

Once everything is set up, it is time to install Rails.

To start, open terminal and type in:

gem install rails

This process may take a while, be patient with it. Once it finishes you will have Ruby on Rails installed on your control panel.

Once Ruby on Rails is installed in full on your virtual server, you can check which version of each you are using: