Sometimes supporting multiple clients or projects can result in a need for more than one version of MySQL on the same workstation. This can be a pain, especially with the Ruby native mysql2 gem that can fail with a cryptic ‘failed to allocate memory’ when used with the wrong client libraries.
To address this I’ve started using Bitnami’s RubyStack. Bitnami’s stacks provide a graphical installer that allows you to quickly specify a non-standard installation location and ports for your developer infrastructure so you can easily install the stack alongside the project being supported.
Instead of using RVM for development I now prepend the RubyStack to my path before working on the supported project:
RUBYSTACK=~/.../rubystack-3.2.1-0 PATH=$RUBYSTACK/mysql/bin:$PATH PATH=$RUBYSTACK/ruby/bin:$PATH
Be aware the Bitnami stacks are 32-bit. The stacks include graphical and command line tools to start and stop components, see the Bitnami wiki components for more details. Bitnami AIMs are also available on EC2, various deployment options are discussed in the RubyStack README.