I have a confession: I’ve been avoiding using rvm for the past few weeks for stupid reasons.

When using rvm with gnome-terminal, I have to tell gnome-terminal to run as a login shell so that /etc/profile is sourced. The login shell is then supposed to source $HOME/profile, which is then supposed to source $HOME/.bashrc. Installing rvm results in me editing my .bash_profile to add the following line:

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[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && source "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" # Load RVM into a shell session *as a function*

All my rvm environments seem to work, so this is a success, right?

Well, I type the good ol' ls command and I notice that all my colors are missing. I notice that the terminal title no longer reads the present working directory, but instead greets me with a disinterested “Terminal.” What happened?

Eventually I realized that this was a problem caused by not sourcing my .bashrc. Where did I go wrong?

The login shell sources $HOME/.profile UNLESS $HOME/.bash_profile exists, in which case it only sources the latter. So what are the contents of my $HOME/.profile?

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# ~/.profile: executed by the command interpreter for login shells.

# [cut for brevity]

# if running bash
if [ -n "$BASH_VERSION" ]; then
    # include .bashrc if it exists
    if [ -f "$HOME/.bashrc" ]; then
      . "$HOME/.bashrc"
    fi
fi

# [cut for brevity]

Aha! The sneaky dot-file actually sources $HOME/.bashrc, and my shiny new $HOME/.bash_profile doesn’t. I fixed this by sourcing $HOME/.profile in $HOME/.bash_profile.

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[ -f "$HOME/.profile" ] && source "$HOME/.profile"
[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && source "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" # Load RVM into a shell session *as a function*

For the memory-impaired: .bash_profile sources .profile sources .bashrc.

Re-open gnome-terminal to find my colors are fixed, my title is correct, and rvm plays the right notes. The world is at peace once again, and I don’t have to avoid using rvm.