Keeping ri useful, still

A couple months ago I posted some tips on making the ri a bit more useful.

In the post I mention how installations of anything lower than Ruby 1.9.2 need special treatment in order to make ri usable on a day-to-day basis.

For my side-projects, I’ve been using Ruby 1.9.2, so imagine my surprise when I ran the following command:

-> % ri Random
Nothing known about Random
-> %

In order to manage swapping between Ruby 1.8 for work and Ruby 1.9 for play, I’ve been using the tool rvm to manage local installations of multiple rubies.

As [bad] luck would have it, rvm install ruby-1.9.2 by default doesn’t generate any of the standard library documentation, which will leave you with a marginally useful ri as shown above.

The remedy for this is quite simple, re-run the installation command with the --docs flag:

-> % rvm install ruby-1.9.2 --docs
  ... # configuring
  ... # installing
  Attempting to generate ri documentation...
  Install of ruby-1.9.2-p290 - #complete 
-> %

Ta-da! Proper local documentation for the standard library.

-> % ri Random
Random < Object

# --- etc

-> %