Poll for Mastodon administrators *who are not using containers/Docker* : how are you installing Ruby?
If other, please reply to explain how you do it, and why.
For context, we are looking at reducing the number of Ruby versions supported by Mastodon to reduce our maintenance burden (like supporting only Ruby 4.0 in the next version) and want to better understand the impact of such a decision.
@MastodonEngineering NixOS
Sep 18, 2026, 10:38 AM
Sep 18, 2026, 9:56 AM@MastodonEngineering rbenv like the doc says to do, never had a problem since 2018.
Sep 18, 2026, 10:02 AM@MastodonEngineering Using the yunohost packaged version, which builds from source.
@MastodonEngineering we're using both rbenv and Debian's own Ruby (if it's a supported version), so rbenv on Debian 12, and apt Ruby on Debian 13
@MastodonEngineering Other: from my distribution, because it's how I get security fixes of all my packages, except for a few applications I have to install manually (mostly Mastodon).
They can be automatically applied ("unattended upgrades"), and I get emails from both my monitoring and my distribution's security mailing list.
Sep 18, 2026, 10:36 AM
Sep 18, 2026, 10:48 AM@MastodonEngineering I use rbenv and as long as here are still instructions for rbenv and rbenv works reasonably well on not too outdated systems, I'm pretty much good, I have not experienced any problems with it.
Sep 18, 2026, 10:59 AM@MastodonEngineering I run it on Debian but ended up using Lix and made a devshell because ruby is a total mess sysadmin wise I find. Then I just have the systemd unit call with the devshell. Dirty but not as dirty as having 20 versions of ruby installed imo.
@MastodonEngineering using rbenv and asdf as for some reason rbenv doesn't install it system-wide, but asdf does... or something.
I probably have about 59 different versions of Ruby installed on my system 😢
@MastodonEngineering I'm using ruby-install and chruby
Sep 18, 2026, 11:20 AMI use rbenv and I’ve only had one issue with it on my Raspberry Pi (which I reported and it was resolved in a later release).
So it’s all good as long as the AArch64 support works (which is also important on AWS Graviton and other ARM environments).
Proposal: add support for JRuby, then ship Mastodon as a single everything-included jar file.
Sep 18, 2026, 1:14 PM
Distribution package (standard ruby package from Ports in FreeBSD 15.1-RELEASE)
Sep 18, 2026, 1:32 PM@MastodonEngineering For my personal instance I use rbenv because Ubuntu still hasn't packaged 4.0. When they do, that's probably what I'll start using.
Sep 18, 2026, 1:40 PM@MastodonEngineering Before @quaff dockerized our instance upgrading Ruby was a super treacherous process. Many a time the the instance was destroyed and had to be restored from backup due to a bad Ruby upgrade.
@MastodonEngineering rbenv is so confusing but it's what I use per docs.
Sep 18, 2026, 2:23 PM@MastodonEngineering I'm curious: Why do people not use docker? I have never had an update break because of a dependency. Am I missing something?
Sep 18, 2026, 4:23 PMIts nice to have some flexibility and ability to customize a few things, for some admins like me having an important system with lots od software components inside Docker feels like having a blackbox.
Why should I have a container with nginx and thousands of libraries that may have a security vulnerability that cannot be upgraded until a new version of the container is released? I rather rely on Debian for security upgrades for critical components.
Maybe I'm being superstitious or paranoid, maybe I'm becoming the old man yelling at containers.
Sep 19, 2026, 8:49 PM@donelias @MastodonEngineering I understand the blackbox somehow but the mastodon software is also mostly a blackbox. The container just bundles everything. For nginx I run that actually on the host.
Sep 18, 2026, 2:43 PM@MastodonEngineering I just use #rbenv
Sep 18, 2026, 5:46 PM@MastodonEngineering manually installed with `asdf`
@MastodonEngineering
The right question rather would be "does mastodon works with the ruby previous to what's in ruby.version" - because it's not always true.
I had to upgrade from ruby 3.4.something for one the recent releases.
And to the answer to the original question - rbenv, but I'm building ruby with it anyway.
@MastodonEngineering when I need to install a tool, I use mise.