Mineshaft

Inspired by PyPA's Virtualenv, Mineshaft allows for the creation of isolated Ruby virtual environments. It aims to simplify the process of installing and using multiple versions of Ruby.

Installation

Mineshaft is a Ruby gem, so you will need a working Ruby environment to use it.

gem install mineshaft

To build Ruby environments that are able to download gems from RubyGems, you will also need to install OpenSSL. You can install OpenSSL on MacOS via Homebrew.

MacOS

brew install openssl

RHEL / CentOS / Amazon Linux

yum group install "Development Tools"
yum install openssl-devel

Usage

Creating a Virtual Environment

Create a new environment and install the latest stable version of Ruby.

ms new env

To specify a particular version of Ruby, add the version number after the env name

ms new env 3.4.0

To use the new environment, you must activate it using the activate.sh script.

source env/bin/activate.sh

Installing Globally

You can install a Ruby environment globally by running the following command. Specify the version of Ruby after the install keyword. This will replace your current system wide Ruby for the user running Mineshaft.

ms install 3.4.0

To view all globally installed Rubies

ms env

Reloading Binaries

When you install a gem that has a binary associated with it, you will need to reload your global Ruby bin directory.

ms reload

Switching Between Global Environments

To switch between environments, use the use keyword followed by a version of Ruby installed on your machine.

ms use 3.4.0

Development Resources

Running Tests

There is rake test defined to run the test suite. rspec ~> 3.13.0 must be installed as a development dependency prior to running tests.

rake test

Authors

Cameron Testerman -- cameronbtesterman@gmail.com

Copyright 2017-2025, Cameron Testerman

Released under MIT license.