getting rid of ruby gems that won't die

Question

I've got a few ruby gems that won't go away.

I think it has to do with when I installed them. Occasionally I have forgotten to use "sudo" before doing a gem install, which results in a write error and from what I can gather puts a copy of the gem in my user directory instead of somewhere it can run. But gem uninstall doesn't work. It continually shows up in 'gem list' but can't uninstall it from either gem uninstall, or sudo gem uninstall. I tried directly deleting one gem after finding the path in my 'gem environment', but that still left the gem on the list.

Also is it possible just to remove all gems and start from scratch? These are driving me nuts.

I'm running OS X.

Answer 1

Assuming that gem clean (or sudo gem clean) doesn't work, I would try the following to totally remove all gems from your system:

You can see where gems have been installed by running the command:

gem env paths

To remove all the gems on your system, simply remove the folders returned by this command.

Additionally, on OSX Leopard, default gems are installed in this folder:

/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8

If this folder exists on your system, as before you can remove this folder to ensure all gems are deleted.

Answer 2

You could also do the following to get rid of installed gems.

gem list -d [gem name]
gem uninstall --install-dir [install directory] [gem name]

if the before mentioned things don't work, I had to do it myself today.

Answer 3

I had a similar issue, but the root problem turned out to be gemspecs that were sticking around for some unknown reason.

After I thought I had uninstalled all gems:

matt$ gem1.9 list
*** LOCAL GEMS ***
minitest (1.6.0)
rake (0.8.7)
rdoc (2.5.8)

No gems here:

matt$ ls -al /opt/local/lib/ruby1.9/gems/1.9.1/gems/
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  2 root  admin   68 Jul 23 14:54 .
drwxr-xr-x  8 root  admin  272 Mar  3 14:56 ..

There they are!

matt$ ls -al /opt/local/lib/ruby1.9/gems/1.9.1/specifications/
total 24
drwxr-xr-x  5 root  admin  170 Jul 23 14:54 .
drwxr-xr-x  8 root  admin  272 Mar  3 14:56 ..
-rw-r--r--  2 root  admin  129 Nov  1  2010 minitest.gemspec
-rw-r--r--  2 root  admin  121 Nov  1  2010 rake.gemspec
-rw-r--r--  2 root  admin  121 Nov  1  2010 rdoc.gemspec

Remove the gemspecs:

matt$ sudo rm /opt/local/lib/ruby1.9/gems/1.9.1/specifications/*

And now the gems are gone:

matt$ gem1.9 list
*** LOCAL GEMS ***

Answer 4

If you have multiple versions of a gem, you will have to first do a clean up and then delete the final gem.

 gem cleanup <gemname>
 gem uninstall <gemname> --version

Answer 5

I had a gem that would not die and had to go the "nuke everything" route by deleting all my gems with the command gem uninstall -aIx. Then just gem install <gemname> and I was back up and running.

Answer 6

update your version of ruby gems gem update --system then hopefully gem uninstall xxx will work right now [was a bug in older versions]

Answer 7

Check out RVM, it allows you to completely manage your ruby environment under your user rather than in a system directory. I've found it much easier to manage ruby versions and gems using it.