Sane Defaults for Ruby Gems

I always rage at rubygems. Every time I setup my OS, I forget that it doesn’t tell me what it’s up to and tries to install globally by default. Here’s how I fix it usually. I create a .gemrc file in my home directory with the following content

gem: --user-install -V

And then add $HOME/.gem/ruby/1.8/bin/ to my $PATH. I had to go looking for this right now because I wanted to write another blog post and then I discovered Jekyll wasn’t installed. Sigh. Typical.