I just switched to using rbenv for handling my Ruby versions. At face value they are almost identical but I like the rbenv philosophy more, with its lighter footprint on my system.
One problem I just bumped into was when booting up my continous tests with Guard, where Ruby threw me the following error.
You’re running a version of ruby with no Readline support
Please gem install rb-readline or recompile ruby –with-readline.
Obviously installing the rb-readline gem did not work, or this would have been a rather lame blog post. I had a similar issue with readline in Rails console but at the time I was using RVM, so now I had to look into a solution for rbenv.
Because it would take a recompilation of Ruby, to include readline, I first had to make sure the dev packages were in place. In Ubuntu this means installing the libreadline-dev package.
$ sudo apt-get install libreadline-dev
After that I set out to recompile Ruby. Using rbenv this is done with rbenv install <version> and by assigning the readline flag to CONFIGURE_OPTS you get the expected result.
$ CONFIGURE_OPTS="--with-readline-dir=/usr/include/readline" rbenv install 1.9.3-p392
Check the Ruby website for the latest version or use rbenv versions to see what you already have compiled and installed.
Once it has been compiled, be sure to use the readline enabled Ruby version and update the rbenv shims.
$ rbenv global 1.9.3-p392
$ rbenv rehash
And there you go, readline support for your Ruby version with rbenv.