From source installation of required libraries for rubies, it is automatically triggered by: rvm autolibs rvm_pkg You should not have to use it manually but just in case: Usage: rvm pkg {install,uninstall} {readline,iconv,curl,openssl,zlib,autoconf,ncurses,pkgconfig,gettext,glib,mono,llvm,libxml2,libxslt,libyaml,epel} rvm pkg remove # to start fresh `ree_dependencies` installs `zlib`, `ncurses`, `readline`, `openssl` and `iconv` in this order.