troubleshooting rvm install

In an effort to get reacquainted with Ruby on Rails, I embarked on installing rvm on my machine. Unfortunately, right out of the box, I ran into a few problems. Since I already have macports and the latest Xcode installed (along with its command lines tools), I started the installation process off by running :

\curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --rails --autolibs=enabled

However, running that gave me this error message:

curl: (60) SSL certificate problem: self signed certificate in certificate chain
More details here: http://curl.haxx.se/docs/sslcerts.html

I tried a bunch of options (like re-running the \curl command with -k/–insecure, installing a certificate from http://curl.haxx.se), but nothing seemed to work for me. I ended up just enabling insecure https downloads through the config file for curl by running:

echo "insecure" >> ~/.curlrc

Not the cleanest solution, because you have to remember to edit the .curlrc file and comment out the insecure (until next time you run into this problem). This led to a second error message in the installation process (when running the \curl command):

unable to convert "\x89" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8 for guides/assets/images/belongs_to.png, skipping

Actually there were a bunch of similarly worded error messages, but the above gives you a flavor of what I encountered. Seems like the solution is that to install a version of the rdoc gem that supports the conversion by running:

gem install rdoc

To verify that the conversion works, you can regenerate rdoc by running:

gem rdoc --all --overwrite

I also ran into this error message when trying to install json (gem install json):

unable to convert "\xCF" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8 for lib/json/ext/generator.bundle

This conversion error is the same issue as the rdoc conversion issue. Installing the latest rdoc and regenerating rdoc also got rid of the json error message as well. By default, the latest version of ruby is installed (which was 2.0.0), but I also decided to install the previous version (just in case I ran into problems with old code or whatnot):

rvm install 1.9.3

In my installation, ruby defaults to the latest version, but in case it doesn’t for you, you can run this to let dvm know which version you prefer

rvm use 2.0.0

or, in case you’re seeing the version of ruby resetting whenever you reset your terminal, you can run this:

rvm --default use 2.0.0

You can verify that the ruby version sticks by running:

ruby -v