Removing all installed Gems and starting over

Question

I recently started learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails, and have watched a plethora of getting started materials. I have been finding lately that I keep getting errors where gems won't install or they will be installed but they can't be used for some reason, and I have decided that I want to remove everything down to once again just having Ruby installed and start over with the installation. One training video had me install most of my gems with RVM, so I don't know if that changes anything.

So in short my question is "How to I get rid of RVM, Rubygems, and all installed Gems so that I can start over with just Ruby?"

Edit: I am on Mac OS 10.6

Answer 1

From the RVM support site:

RVM installs everything into ~/.rvm. To remove RVM from your system run 'rm -rf ~/.rvm'. You may have one additional config file in ~/.rvmrc and of course the RVM hook in your bash/zsh startup files.

So, just go to the command line and type rm -rf ~/.rvm

All the installed gems are in the ~/.rvm folders, so doing the above will remove the gems and installed rubies in one go.

Gems you added pre-RVM with the default ruby install can be removed by typing this at the command prompt:

for x in `gem list --no-versions`; do gem uninstall $x -a -x -I; done

Answer 2

gem uninstall -aIx

Uninstalls all gems without prompt.

Options

-a, --[no-]all                   Uninstall all matching versions
-I, --[no-]ignore-dependencies   Ignore dependency requirements while
                                 uninstalling
-x, --[no-]executables           Uninstall applicable executables without
                                 confirmation

Answer 3

For Windows and Unix copy/paste in command prompt (Ruby 1.9.x).

ruby -e "`gem list`.split(/$/).each { |line| puts `gem uninstall -Iax #{line.split(' ')[0]}` unless line.strip.empty? }"

Answer 4

using RVM, you could just type...

rvm gemset empty GEMSET

where GEMSET is the gemset which you would like to empty. then...

install bundle

yum install bundler and finally

bundle install

Answer 5

rvm implode (see cli docs) seems to work - and it even tells you where to look at for leftovers

Answer 6

1. This is work for me on Ubuntu 16.04. For me, when I was executing command rails -v it throw errors because of NameError. I have installed 3 version of rails (4.2.0, 4.2.6, 5.0.0.1). I was trying to uninstall unnecessary gem using command gem uninstall rails -v version number but I won't able to, but I find a way to solve this problem. In order to uninstall all gems, you have to loop through all entries in gem list with bash scripting. This method is very inconvenient. Thanks to Rubygems 2.1.0, you now could do it with one command.

   STEP - 1

   Firstly, please make sure you upgrade your Rubygems to 2.1.0 or newer. For this run this command (Incase you are working on an older version. You can check your gem version using this command any one of them gem -v or gem --version)

   gem update --system

   gem --version

   STEP - 2

   Run this command in you terminal

   gem uninstall --all

   Step - 3

   Install gem bundles (it is not necessary I think just for precautions) gem install bundle

   Step - 4
   Install the rails on your system using this command gem install rails -v specific version you want to install you can check the rails version on the official site rails all versions example :- I have installed rails 4.2.6 version, you install as per requirement. gem install rails -v 4.2.6

   Step - 5

   Finally check the version of installed rails framework application by Using basic command rails -v. It will echoed the current version of rails frameworks. Enjoy :)

   References

http://ruby-journal.com/how-to-uninstall-all-ruby-gems/ http://guides.rubyonrails.org/v4.1/getting_started.html

Answer 7

Step 1:

I first kept running into an error that said:

You don't have write permissions for the /usr/bin directory

To get permission, I became a root user with (this is potentially dangerous for reasons beyond my current understanding):

sudo -s

Credit

Step 2:

Then, I kept running into an error that said:

[gem] cannot be uninstalled because it is a default gem

This allowed me to uninstall everything:

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

Credit