07 Jan 2026
Announcing rv clean-install
Originally posted on the Spinel blog.
As part of our quest to build a fast Ruby project tool, we’ve been hard at work on the next step of project management: installing gems. As we’ve learned over the last 15 years of working on Bundler and RubyGems, package managers are really complicated! It’s too much to try to copy all of rbenv, and ruby-build, and RubyGems, and Bundler, all at the same time.
Since we can’t ship everything at once, we spent some time discussing the first project management feature we should add after Ruby versions. Inspired by npm and orogene, we decided to build clean-install. Today, we’re releasing the rv clean-install command as part of rv version 0.4.
So, what is a clean install? In this case, clean means “from a clean slate”. You can use rv ci to install the packages your project needs after a fresh checkout, or before running your tests in CI. It’s useful by itself, and it’s also concrete step towards managing a project and its dependencies.
Even better, it lays a lot of the groundwork for future gem management functionality, including downloading, caching, and unpacking gems, compiling native gem extensions, and providing libraries that can be loaded by Bundler at runtime.
While we don’t (yet!) handle adding, removing, or updating gem versions, we’re extremely proud of the progress that we’ve made, and we’re looking forward to improving rv based on your feedback.
Try running brew install rv; rv clean-install today, and see how it goes. Is it fast? Slow? Are there errors? What do you want to see next? Let us know what you think.