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 i

Answer 1

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 2

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 3

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 4

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.

Answer 5

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 6

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.