OS X Mavericks install rvm WARNING

Question

When running this in terminal:

$ curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s

It seems to work fine, but in the Upgrade Notes at the end it says

 * WARNING: You have '~/.profile' file, you might want to load it,
    to do that add the following line to '/Users/steven/.bash_profile':

      source ~/.profile

And I can't use RVM, getting the error

-bash: rvm: command not found'

I am pretty new to terminal and Ruby, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Do as the instruction said.

From the RVM Troubleshooting page.

If your .bash_profile isn't being correctly loaded on OSX, you need to do one of three things:

Create a file named ~/.bash_profile and add the RVM source line there
Add the RVM source line to ~/.profile
In your terminal preferences, change the shell from the default of /usr/bin/login to /bin/bash.

So, check if you have /Users/steven/.bash_profile in your system. If it is present, open the file and add that line at end of file:

source ~/.profile

else create the file and add it.

Answer 2

When you install rvm its paths get added to ~/.bash_profile. RVM will warn you about this during installation as you noticed. You could run source ~/.profile each time you load the terminal, but that's a pain in the neck.

From the bash docs:

When bash is invoked as an interactive login shell, or as a non-interactive shell with the --login option, it first reads and executes commands from the file /etc/profile, if that file exists. After reading that file, it looks for ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, and ~/.profile, in that order, and reads and executes commands from the first one that exists and is readable.

What this means is that /.bash_profile is being run, and /.profile and /.bashrc are being ignored.

To resolve this just open .bash_profile and copy the rvm paths at the top and paste them at the top of your .bashrc file. Open a new terminal window and it should be working just fine. You can either delete .bash_profile, if it's empty, or copy and paste the contents of ~/.profile into it if you choose to keep it.