This blog post originally appeared on the Three of Coins blog (I was a junior software engineer there), but I decided to move it here to keep all my IT stuff in one place.
Bundler and the newest rvm (1.23.1) might give you a bit of a hard time, especially if you’re a less experienced Linux user. You install bundler by running gem install bundler in your GNOME Terminal and it’s a success, but when you want to actually run bundle in your git repository folder, you might get a message like this:
/home/marta/.rvm/bin/bundle: line 32: gem: command not found
ERROR: Gem bundler is not installed, run gem install bundler first.
No matter how many times you run gem install bundler, nothing changes. You’ll receive a similar message if you run bundler in your Rails app folder:
ERROR: Gem bundler is not installed, run gem install bundler first.
Running gem list in the terminal will show you have bundler installed, and which bundle will return the path to the gem… but bundle -v will return the above mentioned error. So what’s going on?
Before you start digging in the ~/.rvm/bin/bundle source code and wonder what’s wrong with paths (it might seem as if there’s a problem with interpreting the proper path to the bundler gem), be sure to check if you have your Run command as login shell option ticked in your terminal’s preferences (in GNOME Terminal: Edit -> Profile Preferences -> Title and Command). When this option is left unchecked, Terminal won’t be able to find bundler when it’s being asked to execute it. That’s why you see bundler on the gem list, but it won’t be found when you call it.
Rvm might give you a hint on that login shell option, but unfortunately in completely different circumstances. If this option is left unchecked and for some reason you want to switch to an older version of Ruby, typing rvm use 1.8.7 will return:
RVM is not a function, selecting rubies with 'rvm use ...' will not work.
You need to change your terminal emulator preferences to allow login shell.
Sometimes it is required to use /bin/bash --login as the command.
Please visit https://rvm.io/integration/gnome-terminal/ for a example.
If all you want is to use the most recent version of Ruby, it might take some time before you actually run this command and thus stumble over that information. Whether you’re a less experienced Linux user or a regular that reinstalled her system recently, remembering about login shell might save you loads of time.
Marta Paciorkowska 