RVM + Apache + CGI Scripts

Hello!

I've configured a new server on Ubuntu 12.04 and I started to use RVM, an excellent version manager which permits to have multiple versions of Ruby installed on a single server (and many versions of the gems - see gemsets), and it makes easy to switch among them.

I've installed RVM under my user (as myself, not as root with sudo) by following the Ryan Bigg's guide, with no previous system-wide installed Ruby. So, I didn't have any Ruby under /usr/bin. My first task then was to replace the shebang line of all my CGI scripts, from

!#/usr/bin/ruby

to

!#/usr/bin/env ruby
# encoding: utf-8

(The second line is needed to define the encoding of the string literals in my code, for Ruby 1.9.)

However my scripts didn't run under Apache. In the terminal I could run them (by typing ./index.cgi, for example), but not over a browser. A relevant note: in both the user is the same, i.e., the Apache user is the same as the one logged on terminal. Through php tests, I've checked the RVM enviroment was not loaded under Apache. (If anyone can solve that, please let me know.)

I saw this tip for running CGI scripts with RVM, which suggests to put the complete path of specific version of Ruby in the shebang line. That can be useful if you have scripts which run on different versions of Ruby. But that solution doesn't work for me, because my scripts must run on different machines, with different users, different ruby versions and different paths.

The solution which works for me is to put a symlink of the desired Ruby version under /usr/bin:

sudo ln -s /home/sony/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.8.7-p370/bin/ruby /usr/bin/ruby

(Notes: sony is my username and I chose 1.8.7 because by now my scripts aren't 1.9-compliant yet.)

Therefore I didn't need to have changed the shebang lines. :) But I guess that will be useful in the future.