The Perspicacious Polyglot's Programming Language Plethora

I like to play around with lots of different programming languages, but install too many and they pollute your working environment, so it’s better to have them installed as a user instead of root. Here’s a way to get several of them installed into your unix user directory. If things go wrong, or you get bored you can easily rm -rf the installation.

Initial Install

Let’s get ourselves a minimal debian environment. I’m using docker here, but you can use a native install, or a VM, or Windows Services for Linux with the ubuntu install.

john@BigBox:~/git/JohnCSimon.github.io$  sudo docker run -ti debian /bin/bash
Unable to find image 'debian:latest' locally
latest: Pulling from library/debian
cd8eada9c7bb: Pull complete
Digest: sha256:58a80e0b6aa4d960ee2a5452b0230c406c47ed30a66555ba753c8e1710a434f5
Status: Downloaded newer image for debian:latest
root@6d933dddbbcd:/#

Just to satisfy my OCD let’s get the latest updates.

apt update && apt upgrade -y

apt install gnupg2 curl procps -y Installs gpg2, curl and ps

ruby

gpg2 --keyserver hkp://pool.sks-keyservers.net --recv-keys 409B6B1796C275462A1703113804BB82D39DC0E3 7D2BAF1CF37B13E2069D6956105BD0E739499BDB

\curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable

To start using RVM you need to run source /etc/profile.d/rvm.sh or re-login to re-load ~/.profile

From here you can run - rvm list known and you’ll see a list of ruby flavors and individual versions.

# MRI Rubies
[ruby-]1.8.6[-p420]
[ruby-]1.8.7[-head] # security released on head
[ruby-]1.9.1[-p431]
[ruby-]1.9.2[-p330]
[ruby-]1.9.3[-p551]
[ruby-]2.0.0[-p648]
[ruby-]2.1[.10]
[ruby-]2.2[.10]
[ruby-]2.3[.8]
[ruby-]2.4[.5]
[ruby-]2.5[.3]
[ruby-]2.6[.0]

MRI Ruby is the reference version of Ruby so let’s install the latest version.

rvm install ruby-2.6.0

I’m running debian and rvm might ask for your root password to install some prerequsites from apt before compiling a new version.

Congrats, you now have a ruby install

$ ruby -v
ruby 2.6.0p0 (2018-12-25 revision 66547) [x86_64-linux]

from here you can now do whatever since I’m blogging this using jekyll

gem install bundler jekyll

go

Go is a language that releases new versions on a regular basis. There’s a similar tool to rvm called gvm. It’s a “go version manager” available from here https://github.com/moovweb/gvm that’ll let you install multiple versions and set $GOPATH and $GOROOT.

as a regular user:

$ bash < <(curl -s -S -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/moovweb/gvm/master/binscripts/gvm-installer)
Cloning from https://github.com/moovweb/gvm.git to /root/.gvm
No existing Go versions detected
Installed GVM v1.0.22

Please restart your terminal session or to get started right away run
 `source /root/.gvm/scripts/gvm`

you should be able to run and see

$ gvm version
Go Version Manager v1.0.22 installed at /home/john/.gvm

Run gvm listall which will give you a list of all the available versions of go.

$gvm listall

gvm gos (available)

   go1
   go1.0.1
   ...
   go1.11rc1
   go1.11rc2
   go1.11.1
   go1.11.2
   go1.11.3
   go1.11.4
   go1.12beta1
   go1.12beta2

of which there are entirely too many.

From here, we can install go as our user via binary here:

gvm install go1.4 -B

try it out

$ go version
go version go1.4 linux/amd64

We can see it gets installed here:

$ echo $GOROOT
/home/john/.gvm/gos/go1.4

From the gvm link earlier, in order to compile a go build environment for versions 1.5 on we require another go build environment. Go compiles itself! Neat huh?

As of now the latest version is go1.11.4

$ export GOROOT_BOOTSTRAP=$GOROOT
$ gvm install go1.11.4

$ go version
go version go1.4 linux/amd64

you can run gvm use - select a go version to use (--default to set permanently)

$ gvm use go1.11.4 --default
Now using version go1.11.4
$ go version
go version go1.11.4 linux/amd64
$ echo $GOROOT
/home/john/.gvm/gos/go1.11.4
$ echo $GOPATH
/home/john/.gvm/pkgsets/go1.11.4/global
$ ls /home/john/.gvm/gos/go1.11.4
AUTHORS  CONTRIBUTING.md  CONTRIBUTORS  LICENSE  PATENTS  README.md  VERSION  api  bin  doc  favicon.ico  lib  manifest  misc  pkg  robots.txt  src  test
ls $GOPATH
overlay  pkg  src

Be sure to set –default so you keep the same version when you relaunch the shell, so that whatever you install stays where you expect it.

node js

node.js, the server side javascript framework

nvm is Node Version Manager. Install it like this: curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.34.0/install.sh | bash

Since there are major revisions to the javascript language between node 4, 6, 8 I’ve found I’ve had to switch more often between these versions according to project than I did with other languages.

You can run nvm ls-remote and get a list of all the node versions available

$ nvm
Example:
  nvm install 8.0.0                     Install a specific version number
  nvm use 8.0                           Use the latest available 8.0.x release
  nvm run 6.10.3 app.js                 Run app.js using node 6.10.3
  nvm exec 4.8.3 node app.js            Run `node app.js` with the PATH pointing to node 4.8.3
  nvm alias default 8.1.0               Set default node version on a shell
  nvm alias default node                Always default to the latest available node version on a shell

so if you run

$ nvm install 10
Downloading and installing node v10.15.0...
Downloading https://nodejs.org/dist/v10.15.0/node-v10.15.0-linux-x64.tar.gz...
######################################################################## 100.0%
Computing checksum with sha256sum
Checksums matched!
Now using node v10.15.0 (npm v6.4.1)
Creating default alias: default -> 10 (-> v10.15.0)

$ whereis node
node: /home/john/.nvm/versions/node/v10.15.0/bin/node

and you can set it to be the default so the setting persists between sessions

nvm alias default 10

So now you can run:

$ node -v
v10.15.0
$ npm -v
6.4.1

rust

Rust is another language that sees regular updates. You’ll just have to check which is the version for the 2015 and 2018 edition.

curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh



Current installation options:

   default host triple: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
     default toolchain: stable
  modify PATH variable: yes

1) Proceed with installation (default)
2) Customize installation
3) Cancel installation
>

select 1 

To configure your current shell run source $HOME/.cargo/env

add $HOME/.cargo/env to your path in .bashrc

$ whereis cargo
cargo: /home/john/.cargo/bin/cargo
$ whereis rustc
cargo: /home/john/.cargo/bin/rustc