Alex Le’s Blog

I wanted to give mechanize a shot for a small prototype I was building.  It’s been a while since I last ran the gem command so of course the first thing it would do was to update itself.  For some reason, it got stuck forever.  It turned out that the latest hpricot gem was trying to build itself from source (! - very strange!) and gem updater got stuck looking for a compatible compiler.

So I downloaded the mechanize gem from Rubyforge instead and ran

gem install mechanize-0.7.7.gem

However, the gem still tried to access the gem index and eventually got stuck somewhere.  The ruby runtime ballooned up to more than 600MB as showed in Task Manager.  I dug up the gem install command and it turns out the gem install can be forced to install without checking the dependencies and without updaing the local index.   So the final gem command is

gem install mechanize-0.7.7.gem –no-ri –no-rdoc -f –no-update-sources

With the –no-update-sources flag, the gem won’t try to go off to http://gems.rubyforge.org and get the latest repository info but expecting there is already a local gem file.

Hope this help someone

If you do “gem install capistrano”, the gem package manager will go fetch the latest gem version of capistrano, currently 2.3.0 and installed in the gem repository. In case you want to have multiple version s of capistrano running, here’s how to do it.

To install older gem version of Capistrano
gem install –version 1.4.2 capistrano
(1.4.2 is the latest one in the 1.x branch before the release of 2.0)

To run specifically the 1.4.2 version, use
cap _1.4.2_ *your_tasks_here*

Shortcut
To reduce the typing, you can make an alias in your .bash_profile on Linux to run the 1.4.2 version as cap1 (cap 2.x.x is still running as cap) using

# add this line to .bash_profile
alias cap1=”cap _1.4.2_”

Afterwards, reload the profile with

$ source .bash_profile

Since I am on Windows, what I did was creating a batch file called “cap1.bat” and saved it within my system’s PATH environment. For simplicity’s sake, I save the cap1.bat file inside my C:\Windows\System32 folder

@echo off
cap _1.4.2_ %*

The special wildcard %* will be replaced with your command-line arguments, saving you the typing.

To read more about the Capistrano 1.4.2 version, check out Jamis’s post here.