Do I have to manually uninstall all dependent gems?

Question

I tried to uninstall datamapper using the command gem uninstall dm-core.

But it seems that a whole bunch of dependent gems also need to be uninstalled.

Answer 1

The problem when running these sort of uninstalls is that they go down the list of gems in order so if a gum is uninstallable then you end up getting stuck. Run the below a few times and it should remove all the gems it is allowed to.

gem list | cut -d" " -f1 | sort -R | xargs -n1 gem uninstall -aIx

Answer 2

This snippet of code does it for me:

def gem_deps(name)
  if `gem dependency #{name}` =~ /(Gem #{name}-.*?)(Gem|\z)/m
    $1.split("\n").grep(/runtime\s*\)/).map do |line|
      line[/[\w-]+/]
    end.compact
  else
    []
  end
end

def gem_recursive_uninstall(name)
  deps = gem_deps(name)
  if deps.empty?
    system('sudo','gem','uninstall',name)
  else
    puts("Uninstall #{name} with dependencies: #{deps.join(', ')}? [y/n]")
    if gets.chomp[/y/]
      system(*(%w{sudo gem uninstall} + [name] + deps))
    end
  end
end

Taken from http://github.com/cldwalker/irbfiles/blob/master/.irb/libraries/gem.rb

Answer 3

I ended up making a simple command line tool to gem uninstall dependencies recursively.

I also filed a rubygems issue to gem uninstall dependencies recursively.

---

That rubygems issue was closed and will not be considered until somebody provides a patch including tests.