How should I upgrade an old version of Ruby Enterprise Edition?

Question

We have a legacy system running a version of REE that is almost 3 years old. The version we're using has some issues that have been patched in later versions, so it would be nice if we could upgrade to a newer version.

This is the upgrade recommendation in the documentation (it was compiled from source): http://www.rubyenterpriseedition.com/documentation.html#_upgrading.

However, does that just overwrite the old stuff with the new stuff? I want to keep all of the currently installed gems (and their corresponding binaries). I don't want any new gems: I don't want it to install a new version of rails, or any of the dozens of other gems the latest version tries to install.

Answer 1

Using rvm or rbenv might make this easier for you. In the case of RVM which I'm more familiar with, the process would be to capture a list of currently installed gems, such as the output of gem list and transform that into a Gemfile that bundler can use to reinstall them.

Upgrading with RVM is relatively safe since the new REE version will be installed in a separate directory structure and you can revert to your previous version if something goes wrong by abandoning RVM or switching to the system Ruby.