Crossfader provides pre-compiled, packaged versions of Ruby and a command line tool to easily switch between them. This project aims to solve many of the same problems Ruby Version Manager and rbenv aim to solve, but in a different manner building upon pre-compiled packages and a simple command line rubygem.

We built Crossfader at Puppet Labs to address a number of problems:

• It takes a long time for newly hired developers to build their toolchain from source. Installing from packages is faster than compiling.
• Developers had divergent tool chains since they were built at different times in different ways. Installing from packages is more consistent.
• Developers have to maintain their own toolchain which takes time from their primary goals. Installing from packages makes it easier to maintain an updated system.

This repository is a build system composed of rake tasks. The system produces the crossfader packages in pkg/. First, clone this project into a build workspace.

Install the dependencies into the local project:

bundle install --path .

To build all of the packages that compose the distribution, use the rake crossfader task. This task builds the crossfader runtime in /opt/crossfader/runtime/bin then iterates over the config/crossfader_*.yaml, building each one with a prefix of /opt/crossfader/versions/<interpreter>/<version>, for example /opt/crossfader/versions/ruby/1.9.3p448/bin/ruby.

bundle exec rake crossfader

Individual builds

This package will install into the system and is usable from a shell environment. For example:

eval "$(/opt/crossfader/bin/crossfader shellinit)"

This could be added to the shell initialization files. For example, in ~/.zshrc:

echo '[ -x /opt/crossfader/bin/crossfader ] && eval "$(/opt/crossfader/bin/crossfader shellinit)"' >> ~/.zshrc

Previous and related works are the Ruby Version Manager, rbenv, and Python Virtual Env.