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I was pleasantly surprised the other day to find out that PA has Ruby installed but a little disappointed to find out that gem is not installed. Is there a particular reason gem is not available? I'm pretty sure gem allows installing gems in the local user directory just like pip and easy_install.

Well spotted! We snuck the ruby executable in there just to see who would notice really... I don't see why we shouldn't add gem -- the problem is that none of us know much about Ruby. perhaps it's time to learn...

What gems were you thinking of installing btw?

The main issue I can see would be having to rename to pythonandrubyandanyothercoolstuffyouwantanywhere.com - just doesn't have quite the same ring to it, somehow. (^_^)

I've just noticed that there's even perl installed... I guess it's potentially useful for installations scripts and the like, but I'd suggest caution if you're planning to support Perl web frameworks. I've had a little experience of Catalyst, for example, and it's caused no end of problems - it didn't play at all well in a threaded environment (the Apache worker MPM, for example) and its memory usage was copious. It worked fine for tens of requests per second, but above that it really started sucking up resources.

DISCLAIMER: This was a pretty old version of Catalyst, so I guess in principle things might have improved.

Noted - thanks for the tip! Supporting non-python web apps is on our radar for sometime in the future... One of the popular requests being PHP, just to run mediawiki! Poor old moinmoin...

For the record I think PythonAnywhere is a gem already...☺

Hi Harry. I didn't have anything in particular in mind but just wanted to try out rocco which is a simple script/rubygem that converts literate ruby programs into web pages. I could have just downloaded the script and it would have been just as good but that is not possible with some other gems so if possible I would like to put in a request for making gem available. It is usually an integral part of any ruby installation and like CPAN it greatly enhances and simplifies getting things done in Ruby.

Also, for anyone that wants to learn Ruby I highly recommend what's called the pickaxe book. Just do a google search and you'll know why it's called that.

So, for davidk and any other Ruby fans, gem is now available...

I want mine to be a flawless diamond the size of a bowling ball!!

Strangely:

from gem import bowlingballsizeddiamond

returns an error...

Ruby uses camel case for classes. Maybe you mean BowlingBallSizedDiamond?

I'll be sure to try that...☺

The only Ruby version I could see was 1.8.7, which is just about at the end of life, so isn't terribly useful except for legacy code. 1.9.3 is the standard at the moment and 2.0 the bleeding edge.

Thanks for the heads-up. Currently the PythonAnywhere code execution servers (where consoles, scheduled tasks, and web applications all run) are using Debian, and we installed Ruby by just picking up the Debian default package. (Obviously we install Python separately, as it's our speciality, so we have more up-to-date versions of it than Debian provides.)

We're planning to switch the servers over to Ubuntu in the medium term, but it looks like they're still packaging 1.8.x by default, so that won't solve it. OTOH it does look like it's not too hard to install 1.9.3 on Ubuntu, so I'll make a note for us to schedule the upgrade once we've moved there.