Using RVM on Ubuntu 12.04 to use Rails. The program 'rails' is currently not installed

Question

I installed RVM from scratch following the installation guide on the official website. I installed Rails, created a dummy app and everything worked fine.

I shut off my machine.

The next morning, I turned on the machine again (cold boot) and the tried running "rails -v" from the console, but I get the following error message:

sergio@Sergio-work ~ $ rails -v

The program 'rails' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing: sudo apt-get install rails

I can run ruby -v just fine, and get the following message:

sergio@Sergio-work ~ $ ruby -v

ruby 1.9.3p194 (2012-04-20 revision 35410) [x86_64-linux]

I can also run gem list just fine, output:

sergio@Sergio-work ~ $ gem list

*** LOCAL GEMS ***

actionmailer (3.2.3)
actionpack (3.2.3)
activemodel (3.2.3)
activerecord (3.2.3)
activeresource (3.2.3)
activesupport (3.2.3)
arel (3.0.2)
builder (3.0.0)
bundler (1.1.4)
coffee-rails (3.2.2)
coffee-script (2.2.0)
coffee-script-source (1.3.3)
erubis (2.7.0)
execjs (1.4.0)
faraday (0.8.0)
google_drive (0.3.0)
hike (1.2.1)
httpauth (0.1)
i18n (0.6.0)
journey (1.0.3)
jquery-rails (2.0.2)
json (1.7.3)
libv8 (3.3.10.4 x86_64-linux)
mail (2.4.4)
mime-types (1.18)
multi_json (1.3.6, 1.3.5)
multipart-post (1.1.5)
mysql2 (0.3.11)
nokogiri (1.5.0)
oauth (0.4.6)
oauth2 (0.7.1)
polyglot (0.3.3)
rack (1.4.1)
rack-cache (1.2)
rack-ssl (1.3.2)
rack-test (0.6.1)
rails (3.2.3)
railties (3.2.3)
rake (0.9.2.2)
rdoc (3.12)
rubygems-bundler (1.0.2)
rvm (1.11.3.3)
sass (3.1.19, 3.1.18)
sass-rails (3.2.5)
sprockets (2.1.3)
sqlite3 (1.3.6)
therubyracer (0.10.1)
thor (0.14.6)
tilt (1.3.3)
treetop (1.4.10)
tzinfo (0.3.33)
uglifier (1.2.4)

Why doesn't my rails -v command work anymore? I used to have this "hack" where I would need to run a command in terminal, "source something something" once, before rails would be "recognized" as an actual command. I had to this once per terminal, meaning if I closed a terminal I had to re-run this after opening a new window terminal.

I can't seem to find this command anymore on the Help section for RVM (where I originally found it) and since I'm kind of new to Linux, these advanced configurations are complex to me.

Any ideas?

Solution 1

You need to type source ~/.rvm/scripts/rvm before attempting to use Rails.

I believe the RVM installation suggests putting this line (or something similar) in your .bashrc.

Run the following command in Terminal:

echo "source \$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" >> ~/.bashrc

This appends the line source \$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm to the end of the .bashrc file.

Doing so ensures that RVM is properly loaded each time you open up a terminal.

Solution 2

the proper fix is it https://rvm.io/integration/gnome-terminal/

you should not add source ~/.rvm/scripts/rvm to ~/.bashrc, you can find some more details here: https://rvm.io/support/faq/#shell_login

Solution 3

Here is another possibility. This happened to me. Everything was working fine and sudo'ed into root. I left the terminal open and returned a couple of days later.

rails would not work. Just like you said it was there in the gems. Turns out that I just needed to exit out of the root user and go back to my regular user and rails was fine.

Comments

[Dave Newton]

Did you select the appropriate ruby and gemset? Is RVM set up in your shell's startup script?

[Todd A. Jacobs]

Closely related: stackoverflow.com/a/10940420/1301972. See my answer about Ubuntu's startup files.

[tsega]

Thanks @mpapis, this works very well and it's the official fix.