How to install ruby & rubygems in Alpine Linux

Problem:

You want to install ruby and the gem package manager in Alpine linux, but running apk install ruby rubygems shows you that the package doesn’t exist

/ # apk add ruby rubygems
ERROR: unable to select packages:
  rubygems (no such package):
    required by: world[rubygems]

Solution

gem is included in the ruby package. So the only command you need to run is

apk update
apk add ruby

Example output:

/ # apk add ruby
(1/7) Installing ca-certificates (20191127-r5)
(2/7) Installing gdbm (1.19-r0)
(3/7) Installing gmp (6.2.1-r0)
(4/7) Installing readline (8.1.0-r0)
(5/7) Installing yaml (0.2.5-r0)
(6/7) Installing ruby-libs (2.7.3-r0)
(7/7) Installing ruby (2.7.3-r0)
Executing busybox-1.32.1-r6.trigger
Executing ca-certificates-20191127-r5.trigger
OK: 928 MiB in 154 packages

After doing that, you can immediately use both ruby and gem.