asciidoctor-epub3 unavailable on PATH on MacOS

[odrotbohm]

I followed the installation instructions and end up with this one:

$ NOKOGIRI_USE_SYSTEM_LIBRARIES=1 gem install asciidoctor-epub3 --pre
Successfully installed asciidoctor-epub3-1.5.0.alpha.14
Parsing documentation for asciidoctor-epub3-1.5.0.alpha.14
Done installing documentation for asciidoctor-epub3 after 0 seconds
1 gem installed
$ asciidoctor-epub3 -v
-bash: asciidoctor-epub3: command not found
$ gem list

*** LOCAL GEMS ***

…
asciidoctor (2.0.10)
asciidoctor-diagram (2.0.1)
asciidoctor-epub3 (1.5.0.alpha.14)
asciidoctor-pdf (1.5.3)
…
$ gem info asciidoctor-epub3

*** LOCAL GEMS ***

asciidoctor-epub3 (1.5.0.alpha.14)
    Authors: Dan Allen, Sarah White
    Homepage: https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor-epub3
    License: MIT
    Installed at: /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/2.7.0

    Converts AsciiDoc documents to EPUB3 and KF8/MOBI (Kindle) e-book
    formats

Anyone seen this before?

[odrotbohm]

I can run the script by explicitly pointing to the gem binaries:

/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/2.7.0/gems/asciidoctor-epub3-1.5.0.alpha.14/bin/asciidoctor-epub3 

[slonopotamus]

I suspect this is not asciidoctor-epub3 specific, but something with your Ruby installation. I expect gem install to install executables to /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/2.7.0/bin directory, which is supposed to be on PATH.

Is it true that this not only happens with asciidoctor-epub3 but with any other gem? Can you execute asciidoctor, for example? It is already installed because it is asciidoctor-epub3 dependency, so you can just try to run it.

[odrotbohm]

It's the only gem that's misbehaving, hence I suspected it to be something wrong here.

I find asciidoctor and asciidoctor-pdf to have a binary placed in /usr/local/bin/, which explains why I can run those directly. I might have lost track about which of the tools I had installed via Homebrew and which ones were plain gems but it looks like asciidoctor-pdf is not available via Homebrew which makes me assume the binary in /usr/local/bin has been placed there by gem.

I am not a Ruby person in the firstplace, but if /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/2.7.0/bin is supposed to be on the path, isn't that something, I'd have to touch with each Ruby upgrade? That feels odd.

[slonopotamus]

I am not a Ruby person in the firstplace

Me neither, hehe.

According to StackOverflow, you need to add bin dirs to PATH if you install Ruby via HomeBrew.

[slonopotamus]

I'd have to touch with each Ruby upgrade?

Only when you switch to a different major release. And you would need to reinstall gems because they install for particular Ruby version.

[slonopotamus]

You may also want to read asciidoctor/asciidoctor-pdf#1238

[slonopotamus]

Let's pretend this is solved.