rv, the Ruby swiss army knife

Welcome to rv, a new Ruby version manager with high ambitions.

Today, you can install Ruby in one second flat.

Eventually, you'll be able to manage all your Rubies, tools, gems, and packages, faster than you would believe is possible.

Testimonials

"what the heckie that just installed a ruby version for me in .22 seconds???" — c. ruiyi smallbird

Requirements

• Operating Systems: macOS 14 and up, Ubuntu 24.04 and up
• Ruby Versions: Ruby 3.4.1 and up
• Shells: zsh, bash, fish

Quickstart

brew install rv
# zsh
echo 'eval "$(rv shell init zsh)"' >> ~/.zshrc
eval "$(rv shell init zsh)"
# bash
echo 'eval "$(rv shell init bash)"' >> ~/.bashrc
eval "$(rv shell init bash)"
# fish
echo 'rv shell init fish | source' >> ~/.config/fish/config.fish
rv shell init fish | source

Usage

echo "3.4.5" > .ruby-version
time rv ruby install 3.4.5

Brought to you by Spinel

Spinel.coop is a collective of Ruby open source maintainers building next-generation developer tooling, like rv, and offering flat-rate, unlimited access to maintainers who come from the core teams of Rails, Hotwire, Bundler, RubyGems, rbenv, and more.

Future plans

All-in-one tooling for Ruby developers.

• Manage Ruby versions, gems, applications, tools, and scripts, effortlessly.
• Get rid of rvm, rbenv, chruby, asdf, mise, ruby-build, ruby-install, bundler, and rubygems, all at once.
• Install Ruby and all your gems in seconds, without having to compile anything ever again.

Future features

• Run any gem command instantly, like rvx rails new.
• Run any script, installing all needed gems, like rv run script.rb.
• Install gem CLIs with any needed rubies with rv tool install.
• Install precompiled Ruby versions in seconds with rv ruby install.
• Manage project gems with rv install, rv add, and rv remove.
• Create gems with rv gem, and publish them with rv publish.

See PLANS.md for more on our future plans.

FAQ

Why are you doing this?

@indirect wrote a blog post about his motivation to create rv.

How do you pronounce rv?

"arr vee", the names of the two letters, spelled out.

Contributing

Install dependencies on macOS or Ubuntu with bin/setup. Make changes, and then run the development binary with bin/rv, or install the development binary to your system with bin/install.

When you're done, make sure to run the tests with bin/test, and the linter with bin/lint. Then, send us a pull request! We love pull requests.

Acknowledgements

rv is (as you might guess from the name) heavily inspired by uv.

It also takes inspiration, features, and approaches from Bundler, Frum, Homebrew, npm, Cargo, and Orogene.

We'd also like to thank everyone who has ever worked on a package manager in the past for helping get all of us to where we are today.

License

rv is licensed under either Apache-2.0 or MIT, at your option.

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dually licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.