Ruby – Uninstall all installed gems, in OSX

rubyrubygems

There are instances where I would like to revert and uninstall all previous gem installations.

For instance, I needed to assist a friend migrate their rails development machine to use RVM. As they had been previously using the system-wide gem, he was experiencing many headaches when working with multiple projects. Essentially, he was the poster-child for an RVM convert.

How can I elegantly uninstall all of the gems on his OSX system?

Best Answer

Rubygems >= 2.1.0

gem uninstall -aIx

a removes all versions
I ignores dependencies
x includes executables

Rubgems < 2.1.0

for i in `gem list --no-versions`; do gem uninstall -aIx $i; done

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Ruby-on-rails – Uninstalling rails and gems, getting error “cannot uninstall, check ‘gem list -d …’

SOLUTION!! I still don't understand why this happened, I'd love if someone could explain. Why was the path non-existant? What caused this error?

Also, I want to mention that the solution I linked to has a comment saying that the question is a duplicate. However, the original has a different solution and did not help me (though its the basis to finding this answer). Simply deleting the gems manually in finder would not remove them from the gem list.

Without further ado - it turns out that when trying to uninstall the gem, it can't locate its path (I think the problem is because of installing with sudo, but I might be wrong). What you need to do is (you have to do this one by one for each gem, or at least I had to):

gem list -d 'name of gem' and note the "Installed at:" location (in my case, /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8)
sudo gem uninstall 'name of gem' -i 'the path noted above' (ex. in my case, sudo gem uninstall rails -i /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8
Some gems still might not uninstall returning a permissions error. If this is the case, what you need to do is create a folder /bin, in the path above. (in my case, mkdir /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/bin
Continue uninstalling as in step 2, still using the original path (/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8).

Now all uninstalls should work!

Ruby – List of installed gems

This lists all the gems I have installed.

gem query --local

http://guides.rubygems.org/command-reference/#gem-list

See 2.7 Listing all installed gems

Best Answer

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Ruby-on-rails – Uninstalling rails and gems, getting error “cannot uninstall, check ‘gem list -d …’

Ruby – List of installed gems

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