[andrewmcdonough]

Ruby has a number of solutions for this - rvm (the oldest, but less popular these days), rbenv (probably the most popular), chruby/gem_home (lightweight) or asdf (my personal choice as I can use the same tool for lots of languages). All of those tools install to locations that shouldn't need root.

[mdaniel]

Yes, I am aware of all of those, although I couldn't offhand tell anyone the difference in tradeoffs between them. But I consider having to install a fresh copy of the whole distribution a grave antipattern. I'm aware that nvm and pyenv default to it and I don't like that

I did notice how Homebrew sets env GEM_HOME=<Cellar>/libexec GEM_PATH=<Cellar>/libexec (e.g. <https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/9f056db169d5f...>) but, similar to my node experience, since I am a ruby outsider I don't totally grok what isolation that provides