CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rubymacos
gkeenley
gkeenley

Reputation: 7388

Do you need to update Ruby manually on a Mac?

Ruby comes automatically installed on OS X. I assume when you get a new Mac it comes with the latest stable release of Ruby. Do you have to update it yourself manually over time, or does it get upgraded automatically when you upgrade your OS?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1269

Answers (2)

tadman
tadman

Reputation: 211670

Short answer: No.

Long answer:

If you just want a taste of Ruby, then no, you really don't need to do anything.

If you want to use Ruby to do something non-trivial, like beyond a "Hello, world!" application, then yes you should update.

The best approach is to use a Ruby version manager like RVM or rbenv where you can get the latest version of Ruby, specific historical versions if necessary for testing, as well as alternate implementations like JRuby and Rubinius.

These version managers make it possible to have multiple versions of Ruby installed simultaneously and you can switch between at any time. You can even pin different projects at specific versions if they haven't been updated to work with the latest Ruby, a common problem with older code-bases.

This pattern plays out with any language, be it Ruby, Python, Perl, Node.js, C# or what have you. If you're doing serious development in those languages the first thing you do is install a version manager and the best version for your situation.

Upvotes: 3

Jörg W Mittag
Jörg W Mittag

Reputation: 369536

I assume when you get a new Mac it comes with the latest stable release of Ruby.

No, it comes with whatever release Apple felt confident to support for the lifetime of the OS release.

Do you have to update it yourself manually over time, or does it get upgraded automatically when you upgrade your OS?

Those two are not mutually exclusive.

Yes, it does get upgraded automatically, in order to, e.g., patch security vulnerabilities. However, an OS vendor will generally avoid updating anything they ship as part of the OS as much as possible, since they generally guarantee backwards-compatibility, and the easiest way to guarantee backwards-compatibility for third-party code that you have no control over, is to just not change it.

For example, macOS 10.14.6, which is the current release of macOS and was released 4 weeks ago, ships with Ruby 2.3.7, which was released 18 months ago.

The last release of Ruby 2.3 was Ruby 2.3.8, and the Ruby developers stopped providing security patches to Ruby 2.3 6 months ago. (Note that Apple does still provide security patches for Ruby 2.3 as part of macOS, though.)

So, yes, it does get upgraded automatically, with e.g. security fixes, but if you want a different version than the one shipped with the OS, you have to install it yourself.

Upvotes: 3

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