NOTE: Updated for RubyGems 1.3.7

I’ve been playing with Ruby in my cheap shared hosting provider. They don’t include everything I need so I had to install Ruby Gems in my home directory. The instructions don’t work. So here’s what I did…

First set up environment variables to tell Ruby and Gems where to find stuff:

export GEM_HOME=$HOME/lib/ruby/gems/1.8
export RUBYLIB=$HOME/lib/ruby:$HOME/lib/site_ruby/1.8

Download and unpack the Gems source (this is the version I downloaded, you should grab the latest:

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/70696/rubygems-1.3.7.tgz
tar xzvf rubygems-1.3.7.tgz
cd rubygems-1.3.7

Run the setup.rb script with the right arguments to install into your home directory:

ruby setup.rb all --prefix=$HOME
ln -s $HOME/bin/gem1.8 $HOME/bin/gem

This will install the gem command into $HOME/bin and the Gems source into $HOME/lib/site_ruby. Gems will be installed into $HOME/lib/ruby/gems/1.8. You should add $HOME/bin to your path. If you want to install it somewhere else replace $HOME with the prefix you’d like to use.