Install Ruby on Mac OS with M2 Chip
Learn how to install older Ruby versions on Mac OS Sonoma with M2 chip using asdf version manager. A practical guide for developers working with legacy Ruby projects.
How to install ruby on Mac OS Sonoma with the M2 chip?
Recently, I was working on a project where I require to use an old version of ruby, it was ruby 2.7.4 . I try to
install this version using rvm and rbenv without success.
After some research I finally found a tool that works for my and the ruby version I was trying to install, this tool is
called asdf .
How to install asdf
There are different ways to get asdf listed in the official page,
but I did it using git.
Open your terminal and run the following command:
git clone https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf.git ~/.asdf --branch v0.14.0
Then, to install it there is again a lot of different ways, but I decided to add it as a plugin to my previous installed program oh-my-zsh (that I highly recommend to use in mac).
Just add it to to the plugins definition in the ~/.zshrc . In my case I was already using the git plugin so it
looks as follows, separated by an space:
plugins=(git asdf)
You can check the official instructions here.
Close and open a new terminal or run source ~/.zshrc to update your configuration and you should be able to use asdf
now.
Ruby with asdf
First, add ruby as a plugin and then install the required version
$ asdf plugin add ruby
$ asdf install ruby 2.7.4
$ asdf global ruby 2.7.4
# Update to the latest Rubygems version
$ gem update --system
Confirm that you have ruby installed:
$ which ruby
~/.asdf/shims/ruby
$ ruby -v
ruby 2.7.4p191 (2021-07-07 revision a21a3b7d23) [arm64-darwin23]
Install rails
asdf exec gem install rails
You can also install NodeJS using asdf but for now I’ll continue using nvm.