Overview

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.

Why Crossfader?

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.

Quick Start (Install)

Crossfader is basically a set of command line tools to configure your shell environment for use with specific Ruby versions. Install the package to get started, configure your shell, then start using bundler.

This quick start process works toward running the full suite of unit tests for core Puppet.

Download the package for your OS version. You can check the OS version with the sw_vers command.

• Crossfader for Mac OS X 10.8
• Crossfader for Mac OS X 10.9

Install the package from the command line. The GUI Installer.app gives an error message, "You need to have administrative privileges to install this software" but the shell installer command works with sudo.

$ sudo installer -target / -pkg crossfader_*.pkg

Modify your shell initialization files to load the default ruby version. This example is for ZSH but any Bourne compatible shell will work fine. For Bash append the line to ~/.bash_profile instead of ~/.zshenv.

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

NOTE: If you'd like to use some other ruby version other than the default, simply provide --ruby and optionally --gemset to the shellinit subcommand, like this

$ echo '[ -x /opt/crossfader/bin/crossfader ] && eval "$(/opt/crossfader/bin/crossfader --ruby 2.1.0 --gemset playground shellinit)"' >> ~/.zshenv

Load crossfader in the current shell or close the current shell and start a new one:

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

Now, when working with your project, e.g. puppet, simply install the bundle of gems into the project directory.

$ mkdir ~/src
$ cd ~/src
$ git clone https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet.git
Cloning into 'puppet'...
remote: Reusing existing pack: 155034, done.
remote: Counting objects: 167, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (150/150), done.
remote: Total 155201 (delta 77), reused 43 (delta 13)
Receiving objects: 100% (155201/155201), 35.07 MiB | 3.67 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (110340/110340), done.
Checking connectivity... done.
git clone https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet.git  5.28s user 4.79s system 52% cpu 19.131 total

Use bundler to install Puppet's dependencies:

$ bundle install --path .bundle/gems/
Fetching gem metadata from https://rubygems.org/.....
Fetching gem metadata from https://rubygems.org/..
Resolving dependencies...
Installing rake (10.1.1)
...
Using puppet (3.4.3) from source at /Users/jeff/src/puppet
Using bundler (1.3.6)
Your bundle is complete!
It was installed into ./.bundle/gems
bundle install --path .bundle/gems/  9.51s user 2.76s system 38% cpu 31.488 total

Finally run the spec test suite, which takes a few minutes:

$ bundle exec rake spec
rspec spec
...

Ruby versions can be listed with crossfader list and activated by passing the version string to crossfader --ruby ... shellinit. Gemsets can be created by simply specifying a new gemset when installing a gem, e.g. crossfader --gemset foo exec gem install bundler.

Quick Start (Build Tools)

NOTE, if you're looking to install crossfader rather than build the crossfader packages please see the Quick Start to Install.

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 if you're using zsh then add crossfader shellinit to ~/.zshrc like so:

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

Or if you're using BASH add crossfader shellinit to ~/.bash_profile like so:

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

Related Work

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